The Pariah Syndrome:

An account of Gypsy slavery and persecution

by Ian Hancock

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Foreword
Introduction
I Out of India
II Reception in Europe
III Conditions of Slavery
IV Towards Abolition
V The Post-Emancipation Situation
VI Treatment Elsewhere in Europe: Transylvania, Hungary
and Russia
VII Treatment Elsewhere in Europe: Spain, Portugal and
France
VIII Treatment Elsewhere in Europe: Germany
IX German Treatment of Gypsies in the Twentieth Century
X German and Dutch Transportations to America
XI Treatment Elsewhere in Europe: England and Scotland
XII British Shipment to the Americas
XIII The Contemporary Situation of Gypsies in Europe
XIV The Contemporary Situation of Gypsies in North
America
XV Anti-Gypsyism
XVI Afterword
XVII Appendix A: Definition of Terms
XVIII Appendix B: Media Representation of Gypsies
XIX List of Works Consulted

--------------------------------------

Notes about the web version of The Pariah Syndrome:

The author, Ian F. Hancock, of British Romani and Hungarian

Romani descent, represents Roma on the United States
Holocaust Memorial Council. He is professor of Romani Studies
at the University of Texas at Austin, and has authored nearly
300 publications. In 1997, he was awarded the international Rafto
Human Rights Prize (Norway), and in 1998 was recipient of the
Gamaliel Chair in Peace and Justice (USA). To contact Dr. Hancock,
send e-mail to <xulaj@mail.utexas.edu>.

1
 The web version of this book includes new passages by the author
not found in the original printed version. The original edition
of this book (1987) uses diacritics for Romanian and Romani
(Rromanes), and includes texts in the Cyrillic and Greek
alphabets. When possible, care has been taken to reproduce these
diacritics, or their phonological equivalents. This has not been
entirely possible because of HTML limitations. For a faithful
rendition of all diacritics and texts, it is recommended that the
printed version of The Pariah Syndrome be consulted.

Throughout, except in quotes from other works, the spelling

Rumania(n), rather than the more widely-accepted Romania(n) has
been preferred in order to distinguish it more readily from
Romani.

---------------------------------
Original Copyright (c) 1987 by Karoma Publishers, Inc., Ann Arbor,
Michigan. ISBN 0897200799. Reproduced by the Patrin Web Journal
with the generous permission of the author, Dr. Ian F. Hancock.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Pariah Syndrome

by Ian Hancock

Acknowledgments

This is a corrected and expanded version of a monograph called

Land of Pain which I wrote and circulated among a number of
colleagues in 1982. It is based upon a collection of texts which
in most cases I have had to translate, or have translated. I
should very much like to acknowledge the help given me in the
preparation of this study by those friends and colleagues, who
include Thomas Acton, Sascha Bley-Vroman, Harry Bryer, Madeleine
Kabore, Donald Kenrick, Barbara Lalla, Ronald Lee, Joseph Miller,
David Smith and, in particular, Victor Friedman. My thanks to
each of them.

--------------------------------------

Foreword
by Dr. T.A. Acton

Ian Hancock is a marginal man. Like all Romani intellectuals, he

has had to live torn between the pariah status of his people and
the embrace of a dominant culture which can hardly conceive of
such a monster as an educated Gypsy.

Some Gypsies in this position accept this, and pass as

non-Gypsies, keeping at a distance all their Romani relatives,
and keeping silence at who knows what cost, to them and their own
children, on all of their family's past. But a sprinkling of such
people find a personal liberation by joining Romani organizations
where intellectuals can make a political contribution to winning
a better place in society for their people. They have to face
incomprehension by non-Gypsies, and often rejection by
assimilated relatives, and the constant accusation that they are
not "true Gypsies." Face to face with the divided reality of
their identity, they are like the man in Yevtushenko's poem,
strung out on a high-wire "between the city of yes and the city
of no."

There are many ethnic groups among the Gypsies, with a great
variety of dialect, culture and occupation. In Europe and the
West, however, two brute historical facts have shaped their
history from the 15th century on: enslavement (particularly in
eastern Europe), and attempted genocide (especially in western
Europe), from which have emerged the commercial nomadism of
Gypsies in western Europe and the artisan sub-proletariat of
Gypsies in eastern Europe. Although the variety of Gypsy economy
is, and always has been, enormous, there are perhaps three core
fields in which both nomads and slaves were involved: metalwork,
transport animals and vehicles, and entertainment.

Ian Hancock's family belongs very much within the entertainment

tradition; arguably, as a university professor, he is still in
it. His forebears were among those Hungarian Gypsies from both
the Romungri and the Lovari ethnic groups who were involved with
circuses and show business and who came to England in small
numbers in the nineteenth century and intermarried with English
Gypsies in the same line of work. Then, as now, the British
circus and fairground world and its trade association, the
Showmen's Guild, were dominated by the large, non-Gypsy, circus
and fairground magnates, who repudiated any idea of association
with Gypsy ethnicity for their organization, in order to make it
politically more acceptable. The small Romani showmen, whether
originating in Britain or overseas, have become in this century a
distinct population in their own right. As the fairground world
has contracted, many have settled, especially in west and south
London. Redevelopment of areas of Battersea and Wandsworth, with
their settled Romani populations, has in turn more recently led
some of these families to return to a nomadic life. Some of
Hancock's relatives have now married non-showmen English Romani
Travellers. It was this milieu from which Hancock's family
emigrated to Canada when he was in his early teens, and to which
he returned as a young man, when I made his acquaintance. He has
begun to document his own family background in the journal Lacio
Drom.

Plucked by the London School of Oriental and African Studies in

3
the mid-1960s from life as a spray-painter for Bush Rank and
sometime road manager for the English band The Outlaws, he has
since become a distinguished academic with an international
reputation in the field of Creole linguistics, and some 160
publications to his name.

One might think that such an established reputation would make it

easier for him to intervene in the field of Romani Studies. This
has not been the case: there exist today non-Gypsy experts on
Gypsy affairs who, by and large, have the field neatly sewn up
among themselves. The questions to which these experts address
themselves - and I write as one such myself - are determined by
academic and policy schema external to the Gypsies' own
realities. If they are anthropologists, they are concerned with
matters like kinship terminology; if they are linguists, with,
say, the genitive construction, and if they are social workers,
with school attendance. They are not concerned with acknowledging
the crimes of society against this people. They usually
concentrate on the "problems" of the present, and either ignore
history or present a stylized and inaccurate account of it.
Despite the wealth of documentation to which Hancock refers, both
popular and scholarly accounts of Gypsies still tend to maunder
on about their "mysterious history." The very fact of slavery can
be almost suppressed. Anthropologists have tended to present the
Rom as primordially nomadic, building their theories around this,
ignoring the fact that many of their "subjects" are only four
generations from slavery.

Nor have Gypsies in general been able to challenge these

perceptions. At the time of liberation, the freed slaves had, as
Hancock shows, the lowest social status of any group, while
runaway and rebel slaves were considered as criminals. Ex-slaves
tried to make out as free craftsmen, or like their nomadic kin,
or else tried to assimilate: to be anything but an ex-slave. It
took a period of detachment and reassessment before anyone could
turn round and say "No! These rebel slaves were heroes."

This was the message of a remarkable novel, Le Prix de la

Liberté, (1955) by a French Rom, Matéo Maximoff, whose own
grandfather was born in slavery in Rumania. This novel deals with
the dying days of Romani slavery when, as Panaitescu (1941) and
Stahl (1980) have shown, slavery and serfdom were no longer
economic propositions in a society that was being drawn into the
capitalist world system. But as the prices in the slave markets
tumbled, and French-educated Rumanian liberals called for
emancipation, many slave-owners increased rather than abated
their cruelties to their declining assets. Maximoff's novel
follows one small group, which flees from an estate to join the
rebels in the mountains. He confronts the Kalderash Rom people
with their own historical shame as ex-slaves, and seeks to
replace that shame by justified indignation, and by pride in the
resistance that did occur. The leading figure in this novel,
Isvan, is loosely based on Maximoff's own grandfather. Isvan is
educated by his master and becomes his librarian-cum-secretary,
and has to face the dilemma between remaining in this comfortable
and privileged position, or joining the revolt of his people. He
is, in fact, the prototype of the modern civil rights Gypsy
activist-and perhaps of anti-colonialist politicians in general.
He is also a marginal man, a liberal intellectual amongst an
illiterate tribal people. After being educated with his master's
children, he has to endure his own family's suspicions, and being
thought a traitor; yet without his knowledge of his master's
world, no revolt could hope to succeed.

Maximoff, the novelist and preacher, used his moral imagination

to recreate this world for the reader. Hancock, the scholar, has
used his academic talents to establish, beyond any question, by
wilfully blind gajé, its documentary reality. The earlier title
of this study was Land of Pain, and the pain in question was
partly their own, in coming to terms with this bitter past.

Both Hancock and Maximoff are latter-day Isvans. The market for
Le Prix de la Liberté and Land of Pain has been hard for
publishers to comprehend. Le Prix de la Liberté was hacked to
pieces by its first editors, and though it has remained in print
in German, was out of print in French for many years, and Romani
and English versions have yet to be published. The Pariah
Syndrome, as Land of Pain appeared in a roughly mimeographed form
which soon became unavailable, and was thereafter passed from
hand to hand in ever more roughly Xeroxed copies across Europe.
Their very unavailability has seemed to increase the demand for
them from the slowly gathering numbers of literate Gypsies across
the world. Together with The Destiny of Europe's Gypsies by
Kenrick and Puxon (1972), which deals with the Nazi genocide
dealt with in the present work, and due to appear in a
UNESCO-sponsored Romani-language edition in 1987, these books
form the foundation of a prose literature which will actually
serve the needs of the emergent Romani nation. Whether it is the
past, or the future, of the Romani peoples that one wishes to
understand, the publication of this edition of The Pariah
Syndrome could not be more timely.

Thames Polytechnic
London,1986

--------------------------------------

Foreword to the Patrin Web Journal edition

This book was the first in English to deal with the enslavement

5
of the Romani people in Romania. When it first appeared in 1987,
no one expected that massive political and social changes would
begin to take place in Eastern Europe just two years later. With
the death of Ceaucescu in 1989 and the shift to democracy in
Romania, many more documents concerning those more than five
terrible centuries have come to light, and our knowledge of the
nature of Gypsy slavery, and the implications it has for our
understanding of the world view and character of those descended
from it -- the Vlax Roma -- are just now beginning to be
understood.

Together with the Porrajmos (the Holocaust), the period of

slavery stands as the single most tragic event in the European
experience of my people. Together they must form an integral part
of the textbooks in the schools, for not only must we not forget
our history, but those who are responsible for these crimes
against humanity must also not be allowed to forget; for if such
things fade into oblivion, they can too easily happen again.

Ian Hancock
Buda, Texas, 1999

--------------------------------------

Introduction

The enslavement of Gypsies came to an end something over a

century ago. It may be fairly estimated that well over half of
the entire Romani population of Europe at the time of its
institution in the 14th century were thus subjugated and, during
the following five hundred years, were the mainstay of the
economy which oppressed them. While this situation endured in
eastern Europe, western European nations were transporting people
to India, Africa and the Americas as an unpaid labor force, for
no other reason than that they were Gypsies. Despite these facts,
the Gypsy presence is not acknowledged in a single treatment of
the Atlantic slave trade - over one hundred were examined in the
preparation of this work - and not one of the principal sources
for Balkan history, such as the works of Scherill, Stavrianos or
Wolff, deals with the subject at all.

It is understandable, though not particularly admirable, that

there should be deliberate suppression in modern Rumania of this
shameful period in their history. I have been told by two
scholars from that country, one of them an historian, that this
topic is not dealt with in the Rumanian school system, nor is
likely to be in the foreseeable future. Attempts to obtain any
kind of official statement in this connection from Rumanian
governmental sources remain consistently unacknowledged. In
Rumania itself, Beck encountered prejudice against the Tsigani
(Gypsy) population at all levels, a situation he has described in
a recently-published paper in which he concludes that

Romanians who are in administrative government and

political positions of authority, explain the Tsigani
situation by referring to America. "You know," they
say, "The Tsigani are like your Negroes": foreign,
lazy, shiftless, untrustworthy and black (1985:105).

The reluctance to recognise this by agencies outside of eastern

Europe is less easy to understand, however. For example, the
Slavic and East European Journal, the East European Quarterly,
the Slavonic and East European Review and the Slavic Review:
American Quarterly of Soviet and East European Studies all
declined to publish an article based upon this study, the latter
giving the reason that it was not an appropriate submission ...
[since] the focus is specifically on the Rom." The North American
Chapter of the Gypsy Lore Society did acknowledge in one of their
own anthologies, after receiving a copy of the same article, that
in the course of the Romani diaspora into Europe some groups
remained in the Balkans, some possibly in servitude" (Salo,
1982:263).

The world does not yet appear ready to believe that the
enslavement of Gypsies ever happened, or that it was significant
enough to warrant being brought to the attention of the larger
community. In Romani, there is the saying that kon mangel te
kerel tumendar roburen chi shocha phenela tumen o chachimos pa
tumare perintonde, "he who wants to enslave you will never tell
you the truth about your forefathers." We cannot wait for others
to document this truth; our forefathers' history must be told by
ourselves.

While the enslavement of Gypsies has been abolished for over a

century, equally inhumane forms of oppression continue to be
perpetuated into the present day. I have tried to incorporate
examples of some of these into the picture here too. The
situation which led eventually to Hitler's attempt to exterminate
the entire Gypsy people is dealt with, not as something separate
or unique, but as just one other episode in the roster of
persecution which has followed Gypsies through history. In many
ways, little has changed since the end of the Second World War;
the persecutions continue, but are simply not centralized in the
same way. Official statements calling for the sterilization,
deportation and even extermination of Gypsies are still being
released today in both eastern and western European countries.
In the United States, history books exclude any references to
Gypsy American history; the several hundred thousand Romani

7
Americans are the only ethnic minority in the country against
whom laws are still in effect, and who are portrayed negatively
in school textbooks. The responses from governmental and
educational sources are that the Gypsies referred to in the laws
or in children's literature are not real people, and have nothing
to do with the ethnic population of the same name. And yet this
Gypsy has been created out of the Romani population by the gajé,
and become institutionalized in Euro-American folklore, and it is
real Gypsies who suffer because of it. I have tried to account
for this by an assumption that there has been a tacit
manipulation of the Romani population by the establishment which,
for its own purposes, sustains the "mythical" identity it has
created, and resists efforts on the part of those thus defined to
adjust such an image. Sibley has addressed this most clearly:

It is notable that myth contributes in a significant

way to the shaping of images of groups that do not fit
the dominant social model. The possibility that the
characterization of social groups like ... Gypsies may
be based on myth is rarely considered, particularly in
governmental circles, probably because these myths are
functional-they serve to define the boundaries of the
dominant system. Accounts of non-conforming behaviour
assume the form of a romantic myth, or they involve
amputations of deviancy, which are also largely
mythical; the romantic image, located at a distance or
in the past, necessarily puts the minority on the
outside (1981:195-196).

Only cursory acknowledgement of the five centuries of slavery

endured by the Balkan Gypsies has yet been made; no detailed
treatments at all have appeared in English. Potra's 376-page
collection of documents relating to Gypsy slavery, written
entirely in Rumanian, is the only substantial study to have
appeared to date, and the only reviewer to my knowledge who has
discussed this work in English, Frederick Ackerley, maintained
that reading it was a "pleasure" and a "delight" because it gave
him a chance to practice his Rumanian. His review dealt with the
Romani words the book contained rather than with the awful facts
of Gypsy history it revealed (1942:69-71).

Hardly much more is available on the fate of Gypsies in the

Holocaust, and only one full-length book in English has been
published on that. While their ex-owners were compensated to the
sum of 96 francs per slave at the time of abolition (Blaramberg,
1885:802), nothing was forthcoming from the Rumanian government
for the freed slaves themselves, no orientation programs set up
to integrate the newly-liberated into society, no assistance with
housing or health care. Gypsies were left to fend for themselves
in a hostile environment, totally unequipped to deal with the
anti-Gypsy laws in effect everywhere throughout Europe and, when
they came here, North America. And in the same way, nothing was
done to help Gypsies after the war. None were called to testify
at the Nuremberg Trials or any of the subsequent war crime
hearings, and no reparation has ever been forthcoming. No Gypsies
were invited to participate in the formation of the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Council, established by President Carter in
1979 to honor the memory of all who perished in the Third Reich
and, despite three years lobbying in Washington on the part of a
number of American Romani organizations to protest against this,
the Office of Presidential Appointments voted in 1986 to exclude
once again any Gypsy representation on the 65-member council.

A people which have been denied access to the means by which

other persecuted groups have been able to fight back - schooling,
settled housing, opportunities for civil and political
organization - remain at the mercy of the popular press, and
herein lies one of the biggest problems of all. Journalists
invariably tend to exploit the fictitious image of Gypsies,
catering to a public familiar only with the Borrovian stereotype
they help sustain, and fail to investigate in their reports the
real problems which Gypsies must deal with on a day-to-day basis.
When such issues have occasionally been covered, it has been in
terms not usually sympathetic to the Gypsies' own situation.

If this is not a cause for concern among the non-Gypsy

population, if that population is reluctant to be reminded about
what it has done, and what it continues to do, then the Romani
voice must be louder. But one way or another, it will be heard.

Dedzhava zumavas te haljaras anda soste si kachi but

bisicharimata anda le gadzhende te prindzharen amaro rrevdimos
thaj amari dukh. Ba fal-ame ke vorta mangen le gadzhe te garaven
kakala prami; ande kodole dzhes ferdi 'l Rroma achen, kaj si
narado etniko amerikano potriva kaste si zakonurja. Pashchi
pandzh shel miji amare phralenge thaj phenjange mudardiline
ande'l bov le Hitleroske, kana zumadjas tistara te prepedil amaro
njamo (Hancock, 1980a) and'o Baro Porrajmos, numa akhardilo manaj
jekh korkoro Rrom ka e Kris Nurembergaki. Arakhle pashchi kodo
numero lengo slobodo el dzhutestar le rrobimaske, 'kh cirra maj
katar shel bersh anglal, ande 1864; vushoro shaj gichisaras ke
maj katar dopash anda o narodo integro ankerdile telal, tela el
tiraxande le gadzhende balkanutne. Anda kodole pandzh shel bersh
o berand samas la cexrake kaj sas e zor lenge themenge: kodzhja
zor kaj pharejadja p'amende.

Antunch tradine amen le gadzhe sar rroburja thaj chora, k'e

Afrika, th'e Amerika aj vi k'e Indija, phuv amare rruduchinenge.

9
 Manaj nishte klishki kaj den kachja shtirja. Mashkar le klishke
le maj dzhangle pa e istorija evropjani vorka balkanutni, chi
arakhena tume dazhi jekh korkoro svato. Bilengo apojde musaj te
mothos e lumja. Kam-prindzhardjuvas; kamashundjuvas!

Ian Hancock
International Romani Union
Buda, Texas, 1986

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Pariah Syndrome

I. Out of India

The Romani people (Roma, or Gypsies) are of northern Indian

origin, having moved out of that area probably some time between
AD 800 and AD 950, migrating westwards into Europe and arriving
there some time after AD 1100. According to Sampson (1923),
linguistic evidence suggests that the ancestors of all Gypsy
populations, whom we may refer to as the Domba, following Kaufman
(1984), left India at the same time. He believed them to have
constituted a single race speaking the same language, which
subsequently diverged into two linguistic branches: the Nawar,
Kurbat, Karachi and Helebi now found throughout Egypt and the
Middle East on the one hand, and the Boga in Armenia and eastern
Turkey, and the Rom or Roma in Europe, on the other:

[Chart]

On the basis of more recent scholarship, however, there is some

reason to believe that the three populations usually thought to
comprise the descendants of the Domba may in fact have each left
India at different times and under different circumstances
(Hancock, 1986a); though each exhibits considerable lexical
adoption from Persian, for example, there are no items shared by
all three branches, and the same is true for the Armenian items
in Central and Western Gypsy. If the same people had passed
through the same areas at the same time, we would expect to find
that at least some of the same words had been adopted. A further
argument suggesting that these last may also have left India
later than Eastern Gypsy, resides in the fact that their language
retains traces of a third grammatical gender, which had become
lost in the Central and North-Western Indic dialects by the
beginning of the Mediaeval period. Presumably the European and
Armenian branches separated after this loss was completed, since
there is no evidence of a three-gender system in either, though
vestiges are to be found in Domari.

The reasons for this exodus of thousands of miles over a period

of as many years are not well understood. It is possible that the
Domba who first left India did so as prisoners of war, or else as
captive entertainers, and as marginals were carried further and
further westwards on the crest of a succession of Middle Eastern
wars. An alternative and more recent hypothesis suggests that the
original population was a mixed one, consisting of
Rajasthani-speaking Rajput cavalry together with their
camp-followers who, coming from various different linguistic
groups within the Shudra caste, moved westwards into Iran some
time during the 10th century and were unable to find their way
back into India again. As an isolated population in foreign
territory it remained intact, social barriers slowly giving way
as their commonly-shared Indian backgrounds increasingly became a
unifying factor. While this might account for the diverse Indic
content of the Romani lexicon and for the name Rom, and perhaps
even for the traditional association of Gypsies with horses as a
means of travel and an item of trade (and, through their racing
and care, a source of income), concrete evidence to support this
explanation is lacking. In any case, the boundaries separating
language and caste in India were less rigid than the traditional
studies have indicated, and the presence of both Central and
North-Western features which Turner (1927) believed to be
evidence of the routes of the first Gypsy migrations, is not a
characteristic limited solely to Romani.

There is no real evidence of why the move was made from Iran into
Armenia. In the late 19th century the Dutch historian De Goeje
suggested that the ancestors of those Gypsies were the 27,000
Zott captured by the Byzantines in AD 855 and taken
north-westwards into Syria; but there is no evidence to show that
these were the Domba, and the language of their descendants,
Jakati, is a dialect of Arabic, not Indian. Reasons for the move
from Armenia into the western Byzantine Empire are perhaps better
understood, and was the result of yet another invasion: that of
the Seljuks from the East, who ousted. Orthodox Christianity and
instituted Islam. Soulis tells us

...we must conclude that the appearance of the Gypsies

in Byzantinelands is undoubtedly connected with the
Seljuk raids in Armenia where the Gypsies, who
subsequently appeared in Europe, had stayed for a long
time, as the great number of Armenian loan-words in
their vocabulary testifies. These continuous raids,
which caused the dislocation of the Armenian people and
resulted at the end of the eleventh century in the
creation of Little Armenia in Sicilia, must have been
responsible also for the westward movement of the
Gypsies and their invasion of Byzantine Anatolia
(1961:163).

11
 [Illustration with caption]
The Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean in 1355 (Holmboe and
Holmboe, 1970:53)

Estimates of the dates of arrival of Gypsies in Europe differ

from scholar to scholar, though Bercovici's claim that "Gypsies
were already on the banks of the Danube when the Roman legions
appeared" is surely an example of the kind of overstatement for
which he is well known. The Rumanian scholar Bogdan Petreceicu
Haêdeu has analysed a number of documents, first referred to by
Bataillard (1849:50-51) indicating that Gypsies were in the
Balkans, and had started to be enslaved, some time prior to AD
1300; the dates and the validity of these have been discussed by
Soulis (1961:161).

With Mohammed II's successful defeat of Constantine, emperor of

what remained of Byzantium in 1453, the Byzantine Empire and the
Middle Ages came to an end; scholars and artists fleeing to the
West helped lay the foundations for the European Renaissance.

In the Byzantine Empire, which lasted for eleven centuries,

Gypsies constituted an oppressed caste, although perhaps not as
slaves. This was due in part to their having been regarded as
Muslims in a Christian empire (and later as Christians, when the
Ottomans occupied the region). Relationships with non-Gypsies
appear in fact to have been more cordial during this period than
they were to become later in Europe. Others were confused with
members of the heretic sect of Athiganoi, hence the later names
Cigane, Zigeuner, Tsigane, &c., current in various European
languages meaning 'Gypsy' (discussed e.g. in Groome,
1899:xxii-xxiii, and Starr, 1936). Occupying this social
position, they were forbidden to enter churches, or to intermarry
with whites, and were permitted to follow certain occupations
only.

Conservative Romani dialects remain two thirds or more Indian in

their basic lexicon and grammar, retaining in fact features which
have become lost in their neo-Indic cognates. Romani contains a
high proportion of Byzantine Greek vocabulary also, acquired
during the period spent in Byzantium, and which above all
reflects their position as domestics and artisans in that
society. The fact that Gypsies were artisans was significant, in
light of what was to follow in Europe.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Pariah Syndrome

 II. Reception in Europe

The documents which Hashdeu translated and analysed (1867, 1877)

were found among papers in the archives of a monastery in
Tismana, in a part of Little Wallachia called Oltenia. One of
these, bearing the date 1387 and signed by Mircea (Mirsha) the
Great, indicates that Gypsies had been in Wallachia for almost a
century before that. Another of the documents was in the form of
a receipt for forty families of Gypsy slaves presented as a gift;
another was a receipt for some slaves given to the monastery at
Prizren by the King of Serbia, Emperor Dushan, dated 1348,
although Miklosich (1875, vol. iii, pp.6-7) questioned whether
the wording in fact refers to Gypsies, an interpretation first
given it by Shafarik (n.d., p.56). Miklosich's reservations were
supported in a later study by Novakovich (1911:383), who makes a
case for the reference being to cobblers rather than to Gypsies.
Still another was a bill of sale for three Gypsies, the cost of
whom was forty horseshoes. The original language of these
references, two of which are reproduced here, appears to be
Church Slavic. They were published first in Hashdeu (1867:191),
and later in Miklosich (loc. cit.) and Serboianu (1930:45-46),
though in the latter they are reproduced very inaccurately. In
Miklosich are found

His Majesty confirms the receipt of the gifts made by

my late uncle, Vladislav, voivod at Saint Anthony of
Voditsa, namely the village of Zhidovishtitsa, the
orchards of Bahnino, the grain mills along the
Bistritsa River, and forty families of Gypsies.

There are also some Gypsies: the first, the chief

artisan Raiko, then Bojko, son of Zlatar, Basil, son of
Sukjas, for whom he is to give forty horseshoes each
year.

The reasons for the institution of slavery in the Balkans were

economic as much as anything else; at the beginning of the Middle
Ages, eastern Europe in particular was profiting from its trade
with the Orient. When the Muslims moved westwards into the
Byzantine Empire, then a Greek-speaking, Christian nation, they
cut off European access to the East, and consequently to the Holy
Land as well. The maritime expansion and resulting settlement of
the Americas were a direct outcome of this: an attempt to find
alternative trade routes to the Indies.

Also resulting from the Islamic encroachment were the Crusades, a

series of holy wars which lasted from 1099 to 1212. There were

13
two routes which the Crusaders took from Europe to Jerusalem, one
across northern Europe through Holland, Germany and Poland,
thence south along the Danube, and the other through Hungary and
Wallachia, both of these routes leading to ports on the Black
Sea. Because of the constant military traffic through southern
Europe, and the prosperity that feeding and equipping an army
brings to a society in time of war, the Balkans flourished, while
western Europe entered a period of slow decline. Balkan trade
also prospered, since the flow of soldiers made the trade routes
safer. Because of the losses of war, there was a gradual
depletion of manpower throughout south-eastern Europe. The
peasantry moved up in the social system to become the new middle
class in Moldavia, Transylvania and Wallachia (Panaitescu, 1941).

While this was happening, the Tatars were invading Europe in a

succession of attacks between 1241 and the mid-1400s. Because of
the decline, and eventual fall, of Byzantium in the middle of the
15th century, and because of the Mongol invasions further north
in Europe, and the Moorish domination in the southwest, a strong
anti-Islamic sentiment had become very firmly established. This
was the situation which Gypsies met upon their arrival in Europe.

***

At first, the virtual absence of a working class made welcome the

skills which Gypsies brought with them from Byzantium and beyond.
Two of these skills were smelting and the manufacture of firearms
and shot, probably learnt in Armenia and the Byzantine Empire:
the words in Armenian for both 'furnace' and 'tin', and the Greek
words for 'lead', 'copper', 'nails' and 'horseshoes' have become
a part of Romani vocabulary everywhere throughout Europe. But
this attitude was not to last. Because of their strange language
and appearance, and their dark skin, they were believed in
Christian areas to be Tatars, intruders from the lands now
occupied by the Muslims. This was especially true in areas remote
from Islamic contact, where the local population had no
first-hand idea of what actual Tatars looked like. Even today,
two of the words for 'Gypsy' in the German language are Tatar and
Heiden (i.e. 'Heathen', 'non-Christian'). There is indication
that in Muslim-held areas, Gypsies were regarded as Christians,
or at least as non-Muslims, and treated accordingly in terms of
taxation and status. They may well have begun to acquire some
aspects of Christianity in Armenia: the Romani word for
'Easter', for example, is derived from Armenian, although an
earlier religion, which survives only in fragments today, appears
to have its roots in Zoroastrianism, which could have been
acquired in either India or Iran, or Manichaeanism, which existed
in both Iran and Syria at the time of the exodus through those
lands (Hancock, 1987).
Kenrick and Puxon believe that the present-day hatred of Gypsies
in Europe is a folk-memory of this first encounter, stemming from
"the conviction that blackness denotes inferiority and evil
[which] was well rooted in the western mind. The nearly black
skins of many Gypsies marked them out to be victims of this
prejudice" (1972:19). European folklore contains a number of
references to the Gypsies' complexion: a Greek proverb says "Go
to the Gypsy children and choose the whitest," and in Yiddish,
"The same sun that whitens the linen darkens the Gypsy," and "No
washing ever whitens the black Gypsy." One word in Romani which
Gypsies in some countries use as a name for themselves means
'black', and is an Indian word of ultimately Dravidian origin:
Caló, among the Spanish Gypsies, and Kalo in Finland. Caucasian
non-Gypsies are called Parné or Panorré "whites" in some Romani
dialects, even by fair-skinned Gypsies. Hoyland repeats the
Elizabethan belief that this dark skin was acquired: "Gypsies
would long ago have been divested of their swarthy complexions,
had they discontinued their filthy mode of living" (1816:39-40).

The closing-off of the trade routes, and the continuing necessity

of feeding the soldiers and the rest of the population, began to
strain the economy severely, and the establishment of a large,
unpaid labor force to produce food and goods more cheaply was
slowly becoming a reality. Measures soon began to be taken to
keep Gypsies in southern Europe by force, so necessary had they
become to the economy. Gypsies, in turn, made efforts to get
away from this situation, and many successfully managed to move
on into northern and western Europe. In some places, however,
such as Germany and Poland, they met with such cruelty, since
they were believed to be Muslims (Hancock, 1980a), that they
turned back to seek refuge in the mountains and forests of
southern Europe, as a result finding themselves once again in the
situation from which they had previously fled. Gypsies, then,
were quickly incorporated, by legislation and by force, into the
system which came totally to rely upon them during the five
centuries which followed.

***

Some writers, such as Jirechek (1919), Potra (1939) and Chelcea

(1944) have suggested not only that slavery was an inherent
condition of the Gypsies, originating in their pariah status in
the Sudra caste in India, but that they were slaves from the very
time of their arrival in south-eastern Europe, since they were
brought in as such by the conquering Tatars. This was challenged
by Soulis (1961:162), who cites documentation indicating the
presence of Gypsies in the Balkans prior to the arrival in the
same area of the Turks. This has been upheld more recently by
Gheorghe (1983), who believes that part of the Romani population
migrated into Europe through the Caucasus and Crimea, turning

15
 south into the Balkans. He further believes that Gypsies were
allowed to move freely and work unmolested for a century or more
before social and economic factors drew them into a situation of
enslavement.

According to Gheorghe, it was the practice of the Rumanians to

use prisoners taken in war as slaves. Citing Grigoras (1966) as
his source, he gives an example of this involving Gypsies:

It is recorded ... that the Moldavian prince, Stephan

the Great, after a victorious was with his Wallachian
neighbours (1471), transported into Moldavia 17,000
Tsigani (Gypsies) in order to use their labour force.
These figures are, maybe, exaggerated; nevertheless,
they suggest the high economic value attached to
Gypsies (op. cit., p.16).

He goes on to demonstrate that Gypsies so taken could accordingly

be given, along with other property, as tribut or taxes by the
barons to the princes, and that slavery as a national institution
developed gradually through such means.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Pariah Syndrome

III. Conditions Under Slavery

Once human beings are made the possessions of others, they become
stripped of their identity as people and are seen simply as
objects. The psychology underlying this is, among other things,
probably guilt; it is easier to live with a situation such as
slavery if the victims are dehumanized. Article I(37) of the
Moldavian Civil Code for 1833 admitted, but dismissed, the moral
wrong of slavery:

Although slavery goes against the natural law of man,

it has nevertheless been practiced in this principality
since antiquity ...

Gypsies were seen as "debased creatures, inferior even to the

animals" by at least one observer, Wickenhauer, whose rationale
for such a statement was that if they had had any redeeming
qualities at all, Gypsies would not have been slaves (Potra,
1935:296).
The earliest legal documentation referring to Gypsies as slaves
date back to the reigns of Rudolph IV and Stephan Dushan (Urosh
IV), 1331-1355, who made one fifth of their number the property
of the monasteries and landowners (Ozanne, 1878:65, Kinder and
Hilgemann, 1964:205). They are referred to variously as sclavi,
scindromi or robie in the documents, Rumanian and Slavic terms
meaning "slave."

Throughout the Balkan principalities, Gypsies were distributed in

the following way: the overall population was divided into house
slaves (tsigani de casatsi) and field slaves (tsigani de ogor).
The former were divided further into three categories of Slaves
of the Crown or State, namely the sclavi domneshti (noblemen),
sclavi curte (court) and sclavi gospod (householders), and one
category of Slaves of the Church (sclavi monastiveshti). The
field slaves were likewise divided into two categories, those of
the boyars or barons, who were known as the sclavi coevestsi, and
those of the small landowners, known as the sclavi de mosii.
There were three principal occupations among the Slaves of the
Crown: that of rudari (or aurari) or goldwasher, that of ursari
or bear-trainer, and that of lingurari or carver of wooden
spoons. In addition there was a class of laborers known as
laieshi, individuals who were allowed to move with some freedom
over the estates, and who did a variety of jobs. In this group
were also included the lautari or musicians (properly
'fiddlers'). Slaves of the Church included the vatrashi, who were
grooms, coachmen, cooks and Petty merchants, and numbers of
laieshi. The different occupations followed by the laieshi have
supplied the names of some of the vici, or clans, found among the
contemporary Vlax (i.e. "Wallachian" or Danubian")* Gypsies:
kirpachi 'basket-makers', kovachi 'blacksmiths', zlatari
'goldwashers', churari sieve-makers', chivute 'whitewashers' and
so on. One characteristic of Balkan slavery was that the slaves
themselves were required to give tribute to the State or, in the
case of the laieshi, to their owners, so that a proportion of
what they were able to find for themselves was then taken from
them.

*Care should be taken not to confuse geographical with linguistic

classifications. Speakers of dialects of the Vlax or Danubian
branch of Romani have spread to many parts of the world from the
Balkans, following the abolition of slavery in the mid 19th
century. As a linguistic category, the Balkan branch includes
dialects spoken principally in Bulgaris and Greece, which differ
in substantial ways from the Vlax dialects.

[Illustration with caption]

Goldwashers in the Banat

17
The job of those involved in goldwashing has been remarked upon
by a number of travelers through the region, and descriptions may
be found in several sources (such as Dembsher, 1777, Grellmann,
1807, Hoyland, 1816, Clarke, 1818, Groome, 1899, and in
particular, Wilsdorf, 1984). Grellmann's account from the late
18th century indicates that, unpleasant as their job was, gold
washers were seen as a privileged group, and distinct from the
slaves:

Goldwashing, in the rivers, is another occupation, by

which many thousand Gipseys, of both sexes, procure a
livelihood, in the Banat, Transylvania, Wallachia and
Moldavia ... In Wallachia and Moldavia, none of the
bojars' slaves, thence called bojaresk (bojar Gipseys),
are suffered to meddle with goldwashing; that being a
liberty granted only to those who, like other subjects,
are immediately under the prince, denominated domnesk
(princely Gipseys): which are also subdivided into
three classes; the first named Rudar; the second Ursar;
and the third Lajaschen. The Rudars alone have the
licence above mentioned; the others are obliged to seek
a different means of obtaining support. Each person is
forced to pay a certain tribute to government (op.
cit., pp. 51-52).

Those engaged to entertain their owners with music have also been
described by their visitors; one such account, which contains a
description of the naju or Pan-pipe, appeared in a work published
in 1777:

Even though the music is just as monotonous and

miserable as the dance, it is the Gypsies who are
charged with tickling their [owners'] ears. The
violin, the German guitar, and a pipe of eight reeds
into which they blow while passing it back and forth
non-stop across the lips, are the local instruments
(Carra, 1777:176).

[Illustration with caption]

Lautaris, ca. 1850

There were restrictions on the Gypsies' playing music for their

own enjoyment, however; a set of instructions for dealing with
one's slaves issued by the Exchequer of the Hapsburg Empire at
about the same time, ruled that "the Gypsies' new masters were to
beat them if they worked badly, and [they] were instructed to
take particular care that they 'wasted no time on music"' (Guy,
in Koudelka, 1975). Maria Theresa's list of rules ended with the
direction that "They shall be permitted to amuse themselves with
music, or other things, only when there is no field work for them
to do" (Hoyland, 1816:74).

Slaves belonging to private landowners were not subject to any

laws higher than those of whoever owned them, and although the
churches and monasteries were governed by the law of the land, it
was their slaves who were treated most cruelly of all. The boyars
were also quite ruthless, although they usually left matters of
discipline to their overseer (called a ciocoi or a vatave). In
one lurid account, Bercovici describes how

The boyars had a special penal code for Gypsies;

beating on the soles of the feet until the flesh hung
in shreds ... when a runaway was caught, his neck was
placed in an iron band lined with sharp points so that
he could neither move his head nor lie down to rest.
The boyars had no right to kill their slaves, but there
was nothing said about slowly torturing them to death.
No law forbade the boyar to take the most beautiful
girls as his mistresses, or to separate wives from
husbands, and children from parents (1928:81).

Although, as Bercovici states, the laws of both Moldavia and

Wallachia granted no right to the slave owners to kill their
slaves, it is recorded in the diary of a French journalist, one
Félix Colson, writing about a visit to the Balkans in 1839 that
despite its common occurrence, not one boyar had ever been
prosecuted for the murder of a Gypsy. One account tells us that
"A Gypsy postillion or courier is often shot through the head or
flogged to death upon any cause or no cause, without the murder
being noticed, for 'he is only a zigeuner"' (Chamber's Journal,
1856:274). Colson, whose diary served as the basis of an
excellent article by Roleine, described a typical visit to the
home of one of these boyars:

When our traveller arrives, he is led to a couch,

whereupon six young women appear. Discreetly, and with
care, they wash his hands, while others serve him with
refreshments. Their skins are hardly brown; some of
them are blonde and beautiful. Handsome too are the
boys who, in groups of three, will light his pipe. No,
the domestics do not work themselves to death; it's not
unusual some times to find a hundred or more working in
the same household ... could this kind of life be

19
 Heaven on Earth for them?

Let's rejoin Colson at the dinner table: "Misery is so

clearly painted on the faces of these slaves that, if
you happened to glance at one, you'd lose your
appetite."

The Gypsy slaves are addressed by Christian names.

Basil seems to be the most common, but they are also
given house-names, such as Pharoah, Bronze, Dusky,
Dopey or Toad, or for the women, Witch, Camel, Dishrag
or Whore.

Never does a group revolt. In the evening, the master

makes his choice among the beautiful girls - maybe he
will offer some of them to the guest - whence these
light-skinned, blonde-haired Gypsies. The next morning
at dawn, the Frenchman is awakened by piercing shrieks:
it is punishment time. The current penalty is a hundred
lashes for a broken plate of a badly-curled lock of
hair ... it is at this time that the abominable falague
is finally outlawed: this was when the slaves were hung
up in the air and the soles of their feet were shredded
with whips made of bull-sinews (Roleine, 1979:111).

The offspring from these unwelcome sexual unions automatically

became slaves. It was this exploitation, as Colson noted, which
was largely responsible for the fact that many Gypsies are now
fair-skinned; Cohn (1973:63) estimates the mean percentage of
white genetic mixture as 60 percent. The mixing of white and
Romani blood was not able to take place among the Netoci or
runaway slaves (discussed at pp. 38-39), who lived as fugitives
in the forests and mountains away from settled habitation; Ozanne
comments on the distinct physical types amongst Gypsies in
Rumania, which he visited in the 19th century:

There are two distinct types of Gypsies in Roumania.

One set have crisp hair and thick lips, with a very
dark complexion. The others have a fine profile,
regular features, good hair and an olive complexion
(1878:62).

Ozanne wrongly attributed this difference to two separate waves

of Romani migration into the area: the first, descendants of the
original Gypsies, and the second, refugees from India as a result
of the invasions of the 'Tatars' Ghengis Khan and Tamerlane in
the Middle Ages, though it is clear that the lighter-skinned
individuals, nearly all house-slaves, could in fact attribute
their complexions to interbreeding with Europeans. While Romani
women were thus used by their white owners, Romani men were
evidently seen as a sexual threat to Rumanian womanhood. Among
the sclavi domneshti, there was a category called the skopici,
Gypsy males who had been castrated as boys and whose job it was
to drive the coaches of the women of the aristocracy without
their being in fear of molestation.

[Illustration with caption]

The forge of a ferari or iron-worker in Wallachia

Another account from a much earlier period describes the peculiar

cruelty of Vlad Tepov V, better remembered as Vlad the Impaler,
who came to the Wallachian throne in 1476. He disposed of some
scindromes, or Gypsy slaves, presumably for sport, thus:

He invited them to a festival, made them all drunk, and

threw them into the fire. Another amusement of his was
the construction of an enormous cauldron, into which he
thrust his victims. Then, filling it with water, he
made it boil, and took pleasure in the anguish of the
sufferers. When the people whom he impaled writhed in
agony, he had their hands and feet nailed to the posts.
Some ... were compelled to eat [a] man roasted (Ozanne,
1878:189-190).

Seventeenth-century laws relating to Gypsies are found in the

forty-article Code of Basil the Wolf, Hospodar of Moldavia
(1634-1654). Examples include

Section 8 If the Gypsy slave of a boyard or any

other proprietor, his woman or one of their children
steal once, twice or thrice a chicken, a goose or any
other trifle, they shall be pardoned; but if they steal
something more valuable, they shall be punished like
robbers.

Section 14 He who may discover a treasure by means of

sorcery, shall not be allowed to touch it, the whole
belonging to the hospodar.

Section 28 A slave who rapes a woman shall be

condemned to be burnt alive.

Section 39 [The free man] who, yielding to love,

meets a girl in the road and embraces her, shall not be

21
 punished at all.

Those who have written about the treatment of the slaves have
believed, probably as a salve to their own consciences, that
Gypsies were actually well-disposed to this barbarity: "Once they
were made slaves ... it seems that they preferred this state"
(Lecca, 1908:181). Paspati wondered whether Gypsies did in fact
"subject themselves voluntarily to bondage "because of the
"mild[er) treatment" from their owners (1861:149, emphasis
added), and Emerit believed that

Despite clubbings which the slave-owners meted out at

random, the former did not altogether hate this
tyrannical regime, which once in a while took on a
paternal quality ... (1930:132).

Paternalism certainly was evident; Lecca tells us that

Gypsy slaves were almost the only artisans ... the

Gypsy women helped the mistress of the house with her
work, and they were on such good terms that they were
even allowed to assist in the beautiful embroidery done
by the young Rumanian women which is admired throughout
the world (ibid., 192),

while Colson was able to report that, "always involved in the

games and childhood life of their masters," Gypsies owned by the
boyars had "developed a familiar relationship with the children
of the nobility" (Vaux de Foletier, 1973:26).

The rustling of legally-owned slaves was not unknown, and was

probably common practice despite the low cost of the slaves. A
document dated 1560 tells of the abduction of Gypsies from
Wallachian estates who were brought into the towns for re-sale by
their kidnappers, and warning of penalties against this (Furnica,
1931). In the 16th century, a Gypsy child could be bought for
about 48 cents, though people were usually sold not individually
but in lots, called either cete, salash or shatre, the latter
term also referring to the communities in which Gypsies lived.
Roleine's novel, Prince of One Summer, deals with 19th century
Gypsy slavery in the Balkans, also the central theme of The Price
of Freedom by the Gypsy author Matéo Maximoff:

The slave market was in full swing. The auctioneer,

 with his Turk-like appearance, athletic shoulders and
sweeping moustache, held a whip in his right hand and
eyed his prospective customers. Gentlemen! I have the
honor once more to offer for sale to you the finest
slaves to be found in any market in the world! ...
tears flowed in silence, for a Gypsy was not supposed
to cry for the miserable destiny of the brothers of his
race ... (1947:7-8).

Other impassioned reflections of life under slavery in the Europe

of the past century are found in the poems of César Bolliac.

***

Gypsy slaves could not marry without permission. Members of the

same family were sold separately, and children often taken away.
In 1757, however, the law involving the disposal of children was
changed, and they could no longer be sold without their parents -
a short-lived reprieve in the overall condition of the Gypsy
slaves: by the middle of the following century, the definition of
slavery had been revised, and had perhaps become even stricter.

On January 25th, 1766, Grigore-Alexandru Ghica modified the law

as it applied to marriages between Gypsies and whites. Both
partners would henceforth be regarded as free, but the man, and
any of their children over seven years of age, would have to
continue to work for their previous owner. Rather than separate a
husband and wife, the husband would be substituted for by another
man of equal age and skill. The pronouncement regarding mixed
marriages, however, only applied to those unions already in
existence; all further such marriages were to be illegal, and any
priest discovered performing them was to be excommunicated. This
did not prevent these relationships from developing, however,
which required that a further anti-miscegenation proclamation be
issued in 1776 by Constantin, Prince of Moldavia, against such an

evil and wicked deed, [since ...] in some parts Gypsies

have married Moldavian women, and also Moldavian men
have taken in marriage Gypsy girls, which is entirely
against the Christian faith, for not only have these
people bound themselves to spend all their life with
the Gypsies, but especially that their children remain
forever in unchanged slavery ... such a deed being
hateful to God, and contrary to human nature ... any
priest who has had the audacity to perform such
marriages, which is a great and everlasting wicked act
... will be removed from his post [and] severely

23
 punished (Ghibanescu, 1921:119-120).

Just nine years after that, in 1785, a law was passed yet again
forbidding such unions between Gypsies and whites, the
justification this time being that it was causing individuals
with Rumanian blood to become slaves. It was not considered,
until the following century, that the same blood could
alternatively have made the same children free. Eighty-five years
later, Paspati reported that

the Turks, who are not particularly punctilious in the

choice of their wives, often marry Gypsy women. Not so
with the Christians, who have kept themselves aloof
from family connections with the Gypsies, and will
rarely have any intercourse with them. No Gypsy is ever
permitted to enter into any of the sacerdotal offices
of the Greek church (1861:148).

Unions between Gypsies themselves were arranged by their owners

on occasion, in order to produce better stock. During his visit
in the 1830s, Colson was invited to one such wedding, to which
the man and the woman were brought struggling and in chains, to
have the marriage blessed by a priest. So shocked by the
hypocrisy of this was Colson, that he fled "in disgust, as though
I'd assisted at a human sacrifice" (Roleine, 1979:111).

Gypsies crossing into Moldavia and Wallachia from other countries

were captured and automatically made slaves; indeed, this was a
specific article of the Civil Code until as late as the 19th
century. On the other hand, many of the semi-nomadic Netoci
(singular Netoto) referred to above, were able to escape and form
maroon communities in the Carpathians, where their descendants,
feared by other Gypsies and by non-Gypsies alike, still live
today. Again we can report from Paspati, who says

The Netotsi, half savage, half naked, living by theft

and rapine, feeding in times of want upon cats, dogs
and mice ... are the most degraded and debased of all
the Gypsy population (loc. cit.).

Although the European observer saw them as the "most degraded and
debased" of all Gypsies, the Netoci were the true heroes of an
enslaved race, escaping subjugation and living under extremely
adverse conditions in order to maintain their freedom and
dignity. Ozanne, probably drawing upon Paspati for his
description, also refers to the same people as

... the most savage and wild of all the Gipsy race.
Half naked, and living only by theft and plunder, they
feed on the flesh of cats and dogs, sleep on the bare
ground or in some ruin or barn, and possess absolutely
no property of any kind. They have a strong resemblance
to the negro physiognomy and character (1878:65).

Serboianu is rather more graphic:

The Netotsi are terribly cruel, while other Gypsies

have much more moderate customs. One could therefore
suppose that the Netotsi were the tribe that led the
way, while the others were merely slaves, who yielded
unconditionally to their owners, with whom the power
resided in the whips and knives they always carried
about them.

Of all Gypsies, only the Netotsi continue to wander,

hated by all other Gypsies, since it is on their
account, because of their wretched ways, that the whole
world persecutes Gypsies ... From my own observations,
together with what came to light at the trial [in May,
1929], I am convinced that the Netoci were, and today
still are, cannibals (1930:36-37).

His own observations were made at the scene of fighting following

the end of the First World War, between Rumanians and Hungarians,
at Szechalom in 1920. He remarked that some of the severed limbs
of those slain in battle, which he had noticed earlier, were
missing. His conclusion was that they had been removed by some
Gypsies in the area to be cooked and eaten (ibid.). The idea of
cannibalism among Gypsies was not new; a number of newspaper
articles reporting this from the late 1700s are reproduced by
Grellmann, who devotes several pages to it himself in a chapter
entitled "On their food and beverage" (1807:15-20). Another, more
humanely-disposed commentary on the Netoci is found, not
unexpectedly, in Colson's journal:

These are the descendants of people who managed to slip

through the barriers and who kept their freedom by
fleeing into the forest and uncultivated lands. Contact
with non-Gypsies means capture ... they live,
therefore, like primitives, by hunting and gathering,

25
 collecting plants and the like, and by poaching.
Sometimes they will rob a passing traveler. Unarmed,
without carts or tents, pagan, black and naked, they
are perhaps more disturbing than alarming.

[Illustration with caption]

Portrait of a Wallachian slave

When Paul Kisseleff revised the slavery laws in the Penal Code of
1833, he also ruled that the Netoci were to be recaptured and
distributed between the landowners and the state. This initiated
a period of guerilla warfare in the Transylvanian Alps which was
to last until abolition a quarter of a century later, and during
which both Netoci and white brigands fought side by side against
the Prince's troops. Although by the first half of the 19th
century, laws pertaining to slavery became less well-defined,
according to Gaster "there seems to have been a fixed, or at any
rate normal, price at which slaves were sold. For, when the
Bucharest papers in 1845 announced the sale of 200 families of
Gypsies, they added that they would be sold at a ducat less than
usual" (1923:68), a ducat being worth 14 gold francs or four and
a half piastres. A selection of statutes pertaining to Gypsies,
taken from the Wallachian Penal Code of 1818, includes the
following:

Section 2 Gypsies are born slaves.

Section 3 Anyone born of a mother who is a slave,

is also a slave.

Section 5 Any owner has the right to sell or give

away his slaves.

Section 6 Any Gypsy without an owner is the

property of the Prince.

Those from the Moldavian Penal Code of 1833 include:

Section II:154 Legal unions cannot take place

between free persons and slaves.

Section II:162 Marriage between slaves cannot take

place without their owner's consent.

Section II: 174 The price of a slave must be fixed by

the Tribunal, according to his age, condition and
 profession.

Section II: 176 If anyone has taken a female slave as

a concubine...she will become free after his death. If
he has had children by her, they will also become free.

[Illustration with caption]

Vlad Tepov V (woodcut)

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Pariah Syndrome

IV. Towards Abolition

The old state laws instituted by Basil the Wolf in the mid 17th
century had become forgotten, and efforts at legal administration
were becoming increasingly disorganized. By the time of the terms
of office of the hospodars (i.e. lords appointed by the Ottoman
court) Caragea and Calimachi in the early 1800s, specific
policies regarding slavery, as well as many other aspects of
Moldavian and Wallachian law, were only vaguely understood;
slave-owners meted outjustice as they saw it, with little fear of
reprisal, and with increasing cruelty. Caragea and Calimachi made
efforts to incorporate statutes then current in the neighboring
Austrian Empire into their own jurisdiction, a move which might
have ultimately been effective except that in 1826, Russia
invaded the two principalities and a new governor, Paul
Kisseleff, was appointed, in 1829. He was a dogmatic and stern
leader, instituting extensive, conservative revisions in 1833 in
the Civil Code; he too, drew upon that of the Austrian Empire for
his model.

Kisseleff was sickened by the concept of slavery on moral

grounds, and was initially quite determined to see it abolished,
despite adverse pressure from the boyars. He was also determined
to stamp out bribery and corruption within his domain. Word of
his anti-slavery sentiments reached the slaves themselves, some
of whom, according to Colson (op. cit.) sought an audience with
him at which they promised him as much gold as a horse could
carry if he would abolish slavery. Kisseleff, however, reacted
with anger; He accused the Gypsies not only of trying to bribe
him, but of stealing some of the gold they had washed from the
rivers. Because of this, he said, they would have to remain as
slaves forever. He made it illegal, furthermore, for a Gypsy to
move out of his district without a pass obtained from his owner.

***

27
 Bucharest, 1834. A square. There's no crowd, just a
group of people in front of a waggon pulled there by
buffaloes. The passersby quicken their steps and lower
their eyes so that they don't have to look at the men
and women tearing at their rags in anguish.
Dishevilled, dark-skinned, these are Gypsies. You can't
escape the entreaties of the mothers whose children are
being torn from them, nor their sobs and screams of
fear, nor their curses; you can't escape the cracking
of the whips breaking down their stubborn resistance to
the separations inevitably to come.

Although this scene is commonplace, and has already

been described a hundred times, it has suddenly shocked
the inhabitants of Bucharest because of the immensity
of the sale. The same thing has been going on for
several days now; so why this huge auction? Because
Barbu Shtirbei, a Wallachian hospodar, wants to
renovate his palace and needs money, and is therefore
selling all of his slaves. For liquidating the stock,
his banker Oprano will keep 20,000 ducats for himself.
One male is worth 15 ducats, and a female 12 ducats,
and children under sixteen half those amounts. This
will total about 3000 slaves belonging to
Shtirbei-public opinion is therefore beginning to mount
(Roleine, 1979:108).

***

[Illustration with caption]

On September 25th, 1848, the Rumanian revolutionaries publicly
tear up the statues relating to slavery (Roleine, 1979:112).

Under influence from the western European nations, these Balkan

countries were beginning to develop a conscience about slavery,
especially because they were coming to rely upon the West more
and more for their economy. The slave auction conducted by the
hospodar Barbu Shtirbei, described above by Colson, caused such
widespread indignation that he hurriedly suggested abolition as a
means of regaining face - but this was at once overridden by the
boyars. In 1837, however, Shtirbei's successor, Alexandru Ghica,
freed the slaves on the estates under his jurisdiction, and
granted them equal status with the white peasants who worked for
him. He also allowed them the right to practice their customs and
to speak Romani. Ghica was probably influenced by the writings of
a number of journalists of his day. Mihail Kogalniceanu in
particular, writing in the same year, stirred public conscience
with his firsthand descriptions of what he had seen as a boy
growing up in Wallachia:
 On the streets of the Jassy of my youth, I saw human
beings wearing chains on their arms and legs, others
with iron clamps around their foreheads, and still
others with metal collars about their necks. Cruel
beatings, and other punishments such as starvation,
being hung over smoking fires, solitary imprisonment
and being thrown naked into the snow or the frozen
rivers, such was the fate of the wretched Gypsy. The
sacred institution of the family was likewise made a
mockery: women were wrested from their men, and
daughters from their parents. Children were torn from
the breasts of those who brought them into this world,
separated from their mothers and fathers and from each
other, and sold to different buyers from the four
corners of Rumania, like cattle. Neither humanity nor
religious sentiment, nor even civil law, offered
protection for these beings. It was a terrible sight,
and one which cried out to Heaven (1837:16-17).

A similarly moving description, written some twenty years later,

is found in Vaillant's history of the Romani people:

What are those animals I can make out over there,

through the haze of the evening? They're coming and
going, sometimes on all fours, like rats, and sometimes
on two feet, like monkeys ... certainly they're not
men; they're animals. My God-they are men! Gypsies!
There are six of them, and an overseer too, keeping an
eye on them. Can you see? They're as naked as Adam, and
their bodies are smeared all over with a thick coating
of tar. There are shackles on their feet and yokes on
their necks, and they are removing sand from the
riverbed. They are wearing cangues, those vile,
triangular yokes they put on pigs to stop them from
breaking through the hedges, but whose three long
spikes prevent the Gypsies from being able to rest
their heads ...

Since morning, they had been sweating blood, with

nothing to drink but river water, and nothing to eat
but bits of bread baked there in the ashes, with some
boiled leeks and a little salt. At the risk of its
being taken away from them by the guard, I gave them
each a coin, and went on my way ... (1857:409-412).

29
[Illustration with caption]
A ferari or iron-worker

In his small book, Kogalniceanu compared slavery in his own

country with that in the Americas:

The Europeans are organizing philanthropical societies

for the abolition of slavery in America, yet in the
bosom of their own continent of Europe, there are
400,000 Gypsies who are slaves, and 200,000 more
equally victim to barbarousness (1837:iv).

Protests were heard from further afield, too; the French

publication Magasin Pittoresque ended an article on Balkan
slavery by an anonymous writer with the following, which surely
helped in bringing the attention of western Europe to the
situation:

In Rumania, Gypsy is always synonymous with "filthy

animal." These Rumanians, who so often have words of
humanity and justice on their lips! To work towards
easing the degradation of these poor beings, beaten
down by pain, to render them born again into the great
family of mankind, to free their souls, would not only
be a humanitarian act, it would be an act of justice.
Where these victimized souls are concerned, the sons
should be considered no less guilty than their fathers.

Ghica's move in 1837 affected only a fraction of the total: just

5,582 families out of a Romani population of nearly half a
million. Nevertheless, it began a succession of similar
decisions; Mihai Sturdza freed his slaves in Moldavia in 1842,
and two years later, the Moldavian church liberated its slaves,
followed by the same decision from the Wallachian church in 1847.
The boyars, however, stubbornly refused to capitulate, despite
the entreaties of the Church and the public.

In 1848, a revolution led by a group of radicals returning from

studying in France replaced Bibescu in the central government in
Bucharest with a provisional joint leadership, which immediately
proclaimed that

The Rumanian people reject the inhuman and barbaric

practice of owning slaves, and announce the immediate
freedom of all Gypsies who belong to individual owners.
It seemed that Desrrobireja - Emancipation - was at last being
achieved. But in December that same year, the principalities were
overrun by Russians and Turks, who reinstituted many of the old
laws, including those supporting slavery. The boyars, with little
difficulty, repossessed their slaves, many of whom had remained
unaware of their short-lived freedom. For those who knew what was
happening, this turn of events must have been a bitter blow.

The Russian-Turkish Convention appointed Alexandru Ghica

(grandson of Grigore-Alexandru Ghica), and Barbu Shtirbei to
their Council, where they served from 1849 until 1855, in which
year Grigore Ghica, a cousin of Alexandru, was made Prince of
Moldavia, and Shtirbei was given control of Wallachia. But
Grigore was not a strong leader, and while he claimed to deplore
slavery, he hesitated to take any action. He made a show of
concern by passing a law forbidding children to be sold
separately from their parents, but it was nearly seven years
before he finally capitulated. As a result of repeated urgings
from his advisor, Edward Grenier, and in particular from his
eldest daughter, Natalia Balsch, who had already liberated her
own slaves and who had persuaded eight other households to follow
her example, however, he finally brought the matter before the
General Assembly, declaring that

For many years, slavery has been abolished in all the

civilized states of the Old World; only the
principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia retain this
humiliating vestige of a barbaric society. It is a
social disgrace.

His proposal to abolish slavery met with unanimous approval, and

on December 23rd, 1855, it became illegal in Moldavia. Shtirbei
followed his lead, and the Wallachian slaves were freed a few
weeks later, on February 8th, 1856.

Complete legal freedom, however -- such as it was -- known as

Slobuzenja and still cherished in the minds of eastern European
Rom today, came in 1864. In this year, Prince Ioan Alexandru
Couza, ruler of the now-united principalities (renamed Rumania in
1861) restored the liberated Gypsy slaves and the non-Roma serfs
to the estates. In 1864, following a coup d'état, the government
of the new Rumanian state, led by Mihail Koglniceanu who
represented the progressive wing of the emerging middle class,
passed a law abolishing serfdom and which provided for the
redistribution of land to the peasants.

31
This agrarian reform law created conditions favoring the
development of capitalism, since it left most of the land still
in the hands of the boyars, who did everything they could to
limit its effects. In February, 1866, leaders from among the
landowners, together with allies from the conservative middle
class who were opposed to the peasants' growing power, conspired
to force the abdication of Prince Couza, and replaced him on the
Rumanian throne by the Prussian King Charles I of the House of
Hohenzollern (Daicoviciu et al., 1959:120-122).

While the land reforms were meant in theory to benefit both the
freed Rumanian serfs and the liberated Gypsy slaves, they had
little effect on the latter. Despite its new status, Rumania was
still heavily dependent upon the Ottoman Empire, which had
instituted feudalism in the first place, and which "cloaked and
facilitated the economic subservience of the country to the
capitalists of western Europe" (op. cit., p. 122). Roma in
particular were kept in conditions hardly different from those
they had endured as slaves. Writing at this time, Paspati (op.
cit.) predicted optimistically that

This people, so long oppressed, enslaved in body and

mind, will probably, in a short time, as they rise in
wealth and learning, under the fostering hand of
freedom attain to some yet higher consideration,

and Vaillant, in the introduction to his book which he dedicated

to Alexandru and Grigore Ghica for their noble action, proclaimed
that those who

shed tears of compassion for the Negroes of Africa, of

whom the American Republic makes its slaves, should
give a kind thought to this short history of the
Gypsies of India, of whom the European monarchies make
their Negroes. These men, wanderers from Asia, will
never again be itinerant; these slaves shall be free
(1857:7).

Events in Hitler's Germany eighty years later were to make sad

mockery of Paspati's and Vaillant''s visions of freedom. Like
Paspati, Clark believed that freedom would bring changes for the
liberated Roma; he believed too that ultimately being assimilated
out of existence would be the best thing for them. Such changes
had still not made much impact by the end of the century,
however, when Clark, who was probably the only American writer of
the time to acknowledge Gypsy slavery, published his
observations:
 ... until the accession of Prince Charles, the
Roumanian Gypsies were more terribly oppressed, sunk to
a lower depth of poverty, wretchedness and degradation
than any otha part of their race, in any other region
of the world. The great majority of the Roumanian
Gypsies were slaves, held in a rigor of bondage which
has never been surpassed; slaves with no rights, no
protection and no hope; mere human cattle of whom their
cruel, selfish owners would suffer no census to be
taken. So long and relentless had this servitude been,
that many of the Gypsy slaves had forgotten their own
language ... The social condition of the free Gypsies
of Wallachia and Moldavia was hardly to be preferred to
that of the Gypsy slaves. They were living, many of
them, in an utter squalidness of wretchedness and
poverty, of nakedness and filth ... With the happiest
of results, however, the Wallachian Gypsies have been
emancipated, and all taxpayers among them are allowed
to vote. What hope or promise there is in the future
for such a race as this is difficult to say ... It may
be that, rising from their low estate, under the genial
influence of freedom of good government, Gypsies and
Wallachs may rise together to the enjoyment of a common
citizenship in a free and prosperous country. It may be
that this is the beginning of a movement which will
gradually extend into other lands, until the great body
of the Gypsies throughout the civilized world,
subsiding gradually into a quiet and settled life, will
at length become merged and lost in the mass of the
common people. Let us hope at least, that so it may be
(1898:505-506).

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Pariah Syndrome

V. The Post-Emancipation Situation

After emancipation, Gypsies left in great numbers (discussed in

more detail in Hancock, 1983 and 1987b), fearing that the old
order would be re-established: it had happened once before in
1848. Families made for the nearest foreign border, and it is the
time spent following this, in e.g. Serbia, Hungary, Russia and
the Ukraine, which has led in part to the development of the
linguistic, and to some extent social, divisions within the Vlax
branch of Romani. Phonological developments in the different
varieties of Vlax reflect interference from the regional dialects
of Rumanian; the shift of original /t/ to /ch/ and /k/, for
example. Some have as much as a third of their vocabulary adopted

33
from that language; these linguistic features suggest that, among
most of the Gypsies in Rumania, bilingualism was extensive.

Migrations out of the Balkans went north-west from eastern Europe

into Scandinavia and beyond, and through Jugoslavia into southern
and western Europe. The first of these reached Paris in 1868.
From Europe, considerable numbers continued on to North and South
America, especially Argentina, and until their entry into the
country was forbidden in the 1880s, thousands were able to make
their way to the United States (see Chapter XIV). In spite of
immigration policy, numbers of Vlax-speaking Rom continued to
come into the U.S., especially between the two world wars. Others
have settled more recently in Australia.

Still others, after emancipation, with no money or possessions,

and having nowhere to go, offered themselves for re-sale to their
previous owners. Grauer indicates that until shortly before the
Second World War at least, this was reflected in the patterns of
distribution of the Romani population in Rumania:

At the time of their liberation, Gypsies stayed mainly

in the areas in which they had traditionally been
located. Today, the densest concentrations are still
found around the monasteries, which had owned many of
the slaves (1934:108).

[Illustration with caption]

Rumania and surrounding territories at the end of the 19th
century

Observers such as Potra have commented on the passivity of the

slaves, and have wondered why there was so little evidence of
resistance, given the huge discrepancy in numbers on the estates.
It was not unusual for there to be three or four hundred Gypsies
working for a household of less than ten Rumanians, and yet there
is no known record of any organized uprising. Grellmann (1783:13)
maintains that there were such revolts, although he provides no
documentation to support his claim. There is, however, a case on
record from 1780 of a slave taking revenge on his master for
having been tortured; the owner was overpowered and brought to
the slave's hut, where he was tied up and slowly poisoned to
death over a period of several months. An intensive search by the
estate staff failed to find the man, suggesting that the Gypsy
quarters were not usually frequented by members of the household.

Centuries of powerlessness and abuse are probably the cause of

this destruction of the spirit; many Gypsies, having been born to
it, probably saw their enslavement as part of the natural order
of things. But it is evident from examples such as the above,
which could not have been an isolated incident, and from the
success of the fugitive Netoci, that not everyone shared this
feeling of helpless resignation.

Eyewitness accounts of the condition of the Balkan Rom during the

last century were generally not sympathetic. An exception is
found in the notebook of Samuel Gardner, a Fellow of the Royal
Geographical Society, who visited south-eastern Europe in 1856,
one year after liberation:

The children, to the age of 10 or 12, are in a complete

state of nudity, but the men and women, the latter
offering frequently the most symmetrical form and
feminine beauty, have a rude clothing. Their implements
and carriages, of a peculiar construction, display much
igenuity. They are in fact very able artisans and
labourers, industrious and active, but are cruelly and
barbarously treated. In the houses of their masters
they are employed in the lowest offices, live in
cellars, have the lash continually applied to them, and
are still subjected to the iron collar and a kind of
spiked iron mask or helmet which they are obliged to
wear for every petty offence. They are subjected to
other servile regulations ... they have the worst of
reputations, as robbers, thieves, murderers even; ...
for myself, I have never regarded them otherwise than a
poor, outcast race, injured and ill-treated ... the
force of prejudice is great, and the fears entertained
of these poor helots are the strongest condemnation of
their treatment.

This contrasted clearly with the description given some years

earlier by Bayle St. John, a British journalist who was obviously
pandering to the middle-class sensibilities of the readers of
Charles Dickens' magazine Household Words:

The children go naked up to the age of ten or twelve,

and whole swarms of girls and boys may sometimes be
seen rolling about together in the dust or mud in
summer, in the water or snow in winter, like so many
black worms. As you pass by, a dozen heads of matted
hair and a dozen pair of sharp eyes are raised towards
you, and you are greeted with a mocking shout, which
alone tells you that these hideous things are your
fellow creatures. [Gypsies] use no plates or spoons,
but dip their hardened fingers into the steaming

35
 kettle, and bring up a ball of porridge or a fragment
of meat, which they cool by throwing from one palm to
the other until they can venture to cast it down their
throats. The women and children eat after the men who,
as soon as they have wiped their hands in their hair,
take again to their pipes and, if they can afford it,
to drinking. They make themselves merry for an hour or
two, until fatigue comes over them, and then go
pell-mell to their huts, or stretch out by the embers
of their fires. Nothing can be more abominably filthy
than the habits of this degraded tribe ... we are sorry
to be obliged to add that both men and women are, as a
rule, exceedingly debauched.

[Illustration with caption]

A Gypsy habitation in Wallachia

Even St. John's description of the slaves themselves reflects a

literary cliché of the period, describing in stereotypical terms
(like Ozanne, p.21 above), the kind of slave his Victorian
audience was more likely to have been familiar with:

The men are generally of lofty stature, robust and

sinewy. Their skin is black or copper-coloured; their
hair, thick and woolly; their lips are of negro
heaviness, and their teeth white as pearls; the nose is
considerably flattened, and the whole countenance is
illumined, as it were, by lively, rolling eyes.

Bayle St. John published his account anonymously. Another

description by a writer who chose not to put his name to it,
appeared in Chamber's Journal in 1856, and contains the same
mixture of fascination and revulsion:

On a heap of straw in the middle, in the full heat of

the blazing sun, lay four gipsies asleep. They were all
four tall, powerful men, with coal-black hair as coarse
as rope, streaming over faces of African blackness; and
as they lay relaxed in sleep, their figures seemed
gigantic. Their dress, so to call it, was a collection
of the vilest rags ... if an injury was committed on a
gipsy, he had no redress ...

Rascals as the zigeuners are, and living in the

greatest misery and filth-in fact, the dirtier their
huts, the better they like them - they are still a very
 handsome race, the women especially. These bold, brown,
beautiful women only make one astonished to think how
such eyes, teeth and figures can exist in the stifling
atmosphere of their tents.

A further eyewitness account, by yet another anonymous writer,

appeared in the French journal Magasin Pittoresque and adds to
the picture:

Degraded by slavery, brutalized by ignorance and

beatings, they have no material enjoyment by way of
compensation. These are cattle, maintained by the boyar
at the least possible cost; he feeds them with
mamaliga, a kind of thick porridge made of corn meal.
Their summer clothing consists of thick canvas which
they wear until it rots off. Rain serves for their
ablutions, and the children go completely naked. In
winter, they drape themselves with rags scavenged from
cast-offs: old suits, old coverlets, old carpets - all
of these serve as their clothing. As for accommodation,
they are not even allowed the luxury of dreaming about
it. They ensconce themselves everywhere. In the
morning, the vatave, or master's overseer, carefully
wrapped in furs and with his whip in hand, assembles
them together in order to assign them to the day's
tasks. A distressing sight, this foul-smelling,
haggard, half naked shivering group, everywhere
appearing from stables, kitchens and sheds. The
overseer, always hard and inflexible, beats them as
much from fancy as from a desire to assert his
authority.

Simson, in his more moderate discussion of the Balkan Romani

population, believed that "They seldom beg, and more rarely steal
... they are not an idle race; they ought rather to be described
as a laborious race; and the majority honestly endeavour to earn
a livelihood" (1865:74), a quotation lifted verbatim (and
without acknowledgement) from Clarke (1800:592) and repeated in
Hoyland (1816:261). At the same place, Simson reproduces part of
a description of the Wallachian Gypsies which appeared in the
1839 Report of the Scottish Mission of Enquiry to the Jews:

They are almost all slaves, bought and sold at

pleasure. One was lately sold for 200 piastres, but the
general price is 500. Perhaps 3 pounds is the average
price, and the female Gipsies are sold much cheaper.

37
 The sale is generally carried on by private bargain.
The men are the best mechanics in the country; so that
smiths and masons are taken from this class. The women
are considered the best cooks, and therefore almost
every wealthy family has a Gipsy cook. Their appearance
is similar to that of the Gipsies in other countries;
being all dark, with fine black eyes, and long black
hair. They have a language peculiar to themselves, and
though they seem to have no system of religion, yet are
very superstitious in observing lucky and unlucky days.
They are all fond of music, both vocal and
instrumental, and excel in it.

***

There exists a number of poems dealing with slavery and

emancipation, which were composed in the mid 19th century by such
writers as Coradini and Bolliac; some of these are found in the
pages of Colocci (1889), translated into Italian. The originals
were in French, and dwell on the magnanimity of the liberators as
much as they do on the liberated - an indication of their
non-Gypsy origin. English and Romani translations (by the present
author) of two of these are given here, together with the
original versions:

Accourez tous, bien-aimés frères!

Aujourd'hui accourez tous!
Libres tous nous
Fait le prince roumain,
Ainsi soit-il!

Dieu, la terre, soleil, la lune

L'aurore, la forêt, l'humanité,
En chœur célèbrant Tot
Pour la bonté de la Moldavie

Tous, les viellards, hommes faites,

Jeunes hommes, agneaux de bercail,
Enfants, ils ont brisé nos fers,
Le prince et bon nombre de Roumains.

Dieu grand! Et vous astres

Qui nous avez faits à la lumière,
Aimez tous les Roumains,
Ils ont brisé notre esclavage.

Come running, beloved brothers all-

Today, come running all;
For freed we are, by the
Rumanian prince.
Let us cry out with full voice,
So let it be!

God; Earth; Sun; Moon;

Dawn; Forest; Humanity-
In chorus they honor Tot
For the goodness of Moldavia

Everyone!
The old, the grown,
young men, babes yet in arms,
and children! They have
broken off our irons
The Prince, and all
his citizens.

Great God, and all your stars

which give to us the light,
Love all Rumanian people,
For breaking our bonds
of slavery.

Hajtar, prasten, kuch phralale,

Te prasten orde akana;
Ke slobozi kerdiljam
le thagarestar rumunjako;
Das baro muj
Te gadzhja vorta si.

O Del; o phuv; o kham; o tchon;

zori, haj vosh, dzhene;
Ekhetanes sharen el Totas
le mishtimaske la Moldovjako

Sarro! Phure, barile,

le Romorre - ji bakre and'e mal;
Dazhji cinorre - malade pa' mende
amare lancurja -
O princo thaj but rumunicka.

Bare Devla! Thaj ji'l cherxa

kaj kerenas amen e vedjara
t'al Tume drazhi sa'l vlaxondar
kaj furshosajle 'maro rrobimos!

39
Réjouissez-vous tous, nobles enfants de Rome,
Vous tous, qui dans vos seins sentez battre un cœur d'homme;
Plus d'esclaves chez nous! Le grand mot est lancé.
Heureux qui, le premier, chez nous l'a prononcé!
"Réjouissez-vous en, Moldaves!
Nos divins autels sont lavés;
Notre Eglise n'a plus d'esclaves."
Honneur à qui les a sauvé!
Ils avaient tous un cœur, ils avaient tous une âme,
Tous avaient Dieu pour maître,
Et pour mère une femme.
Et tous au joug de fer avaient été rivés!
Honneur!
Honneur à vous qui les avez sauvés!

Be glad, ye nobles sons of Rom,

In all whose breasts do beat
the hearts of men.
No longer slaves!
The Good Word has come down.
Happy he must be who first among us said
"Rejoice at this, Moldavians!
Our holy altars now are all washed clean!
Our Church has slaves no more!."
Honor to he who freed them!
For each had a heart, and each a soul,
Each had God as his master,
and each was born of woman-
Still, each was clamped into the iron yoke.
Honor!
Honor to you who freed them!

T'aves vojako, Rroma pachvalo,

And'e kolin kaske si jilo murshano;
Ma naj rroburja!
Kol drazhi vorbi amenga avile.
Vesolo kaj pervo mothodja
"Pa kadoleste radujsavon Moldovaja;
Amari svunci altarja vortosajle
Ma naj la khangeriake kak rrobi."
Pachiv das les kaj kerdo len mekhle.
Ke svakoske sas o Del o raj pesko
Thaj anda manushni kerdo.
Ma svako xutilajlo ande dzhuto sastruno.
Pachiv,
Pachiv das les kaj kerdo mekhle.
After emancipation, the freed slaves attempted to improve their
condition, and safeguard against any future domination by
outsiders by working together toward some kind of political
unity. A pan-European congress was held in September, 1879, in
Kisfalu in Hungary, with the intention of establishing civil and
political rights for Gypsies throughout Europe. Little came of
this. The affair was mocked in the press, who found the concepts
of intellectualism and 'Gypsiness' incompatible - an attitude
still very prevalent today. Lecca blamed the lack of achievement
on the Gypsies themselves, believing that "laziness is one of the
greatest obstacles to the[ir] development" (1908:183).

In 1913, a statue of Kogalniceanu was erected at Piatri Neamts,

and was reported in the western press in the Near East magazine
for June 12th that year, as follows:

A touching episode occurred in connection with the

unveiling of the statue of Mihail Kogalniceanu at
Piatra Neamtz. Mihail Kogaliniceanu was a well-known
reformer, and one of his principal acts had been to
secure liberty for the many thousands of Roumanian
gipsies, who had hitherto been in a condition
approximating to servitude. Two days after the
unveiling ceremony, a vast concourse of gipsies arrived
at Piatra Neamtz and proceeded to the monument. Before
the statue they placed a wreath of oak leaves and wild
flowers, and then, to the wierd accompaniment of a
gipsy band, the whole party joined in a national dance
round the statue of their liberator.

In 1933, another conference, widely attended and publicized, was

held by the General Association of the Gypsies of Rumania in
Bucharest. It sought, among other things, to erect a monument to
Grigore Ghica, and to make the date of emancipation a national
holiday, and to establish a library, a hospital and a university
for Rom (Haley, 1934). Although he made brief reference to this
in his widely-influential book Zigeuner, which appeared three
years later, Martin Block (1936:210) minimized its significance,
stating (op. cit., 8) that "Gypsies offer no contribution to
civilization, have no history, and do themselves in no way help
to elucidate the problem of their survival." Distorted
scholarship of this type, written during the time of the Nazi
regime, helped justify Hitler's later program of genocide against
the Romani people.

[Illustration with caption]

Poster advertising a slave auction in Wallachia in 1852*. It
reads"For sale: a prime lot of Gypsy slaves, for sale by auction

41
at the Monastery of St. Elias, May 8th, 1852. Consisting of
eighteen men, ten boys, seven women and three girls, in fine
condition."

*A photostat of this poster was kindly sent to me by Mr. Nicolae

Oprescu of Bucharest. The poster appears to have provided the
model for a similar illustration in Colocci (1889:89).

The general attitude in Rumania has not improved, as Beck has

shown. Two American visitors to that country some years ago
reported that poisoning Gypsies has been one means of dealing
with them:

Later that day, we came to a Gypsy camp by a stream. A

small, dark-skinned boy - barefoot and dirty - ran to
beg for money. Bill tried a few words of Rumanian he
had learned, but the child would not come close. Bill
then offered him a piece of chocolate, whereupon the
boy suddenly screamed "Moarte! Moarte! - Death! Death!"
and scurried away. Many times in the past, we were
told, the unwanted Gypsies were given poisoned food.
One of the first lessons drummed into a Gypsy child is
never to accept food from strangers (Durrancell and
Knight, 1979:820).

It is the almost total lack of concern for anything except the

traditional, from governmental and academic bodies, which has,
more than any other factor, hindered the advancement of the
Romani people. The wonder is rather that, since emancipation,
Gypsies have continued to fight vicious discrimination in every
country they have been in, and from every government. Yet with
practically no help whatsoever from any outside agency, they have
gained admittance to the United Nations Organization and the
Council of Europe. Since 1971, there have been three
international congresses, and the World Romani Union which
sponsors these, now has bureaux in 27 countries. In March, 1982,
twenty years after its founding, another Romani organization, the
Comité International Rom held a ceremony commemorating the 125th
anniversary of abolition, and has made this a recurrent event.

Kogalniceanu predicted that the abolition of slavery would herald

the demise of Romani, since "in becoming civilized, they will
experience new concepts, and not retain so defective a language"
(1837:36). Since the end of the Second World War, however, and in
particular since the Romani people obtained permanent
consultative status in the UN in 1979, through Romani language
journals and newsletters and its increasing use at the
international congresses, the language has come to serve more and
 more as the principal binding factor of Jekhipe - Oneness.

[Illustration with caption]

A satra or Gypsy village in Wallachia, 1862 ("Un village des
Tsiganes chrétiens", Lancelot, 1868:307)

"In these strange houses, which are more like gutters, one serves
for each family, the roofs are made of branches daubed with mud,
upon which grass grows. At least ten people, on average, live
here. There are no furnishings, just a kettle, a pan, a
water-jug, one spoon and one knife, and a few sheepskins and
tattered blankets: it is a home under a hole in the roof.
Lacking any wood, cow-dung is used as fuel. Torches do for
light. Rain comes through the roof, and rheumatism follows it.
No clean water is available, and yet the boyars stigmatize the
Gypsies for being filthy. They go in rags, even in temperatures
of minus twenty degrees, their feet wrapped in rags and the skins
of dogs" (Colson, in Roleine, 1979:112).

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Pariah Syndrome

VI. Treatment Elsewhere in Europe:
Transylvania, Hungary and Russia

The instituionalized Oppression of Gypsies existed in other

places besides Moldavia and Wallachia; Wlislocki has written
about the "appalling and unmentionable punishments" inflicted
upon Gypsies in Transylvania (also part of greater Rumania) "not
only for attempting to escape, but for such trivial offences as
stealing [a piece of fruit]"; another incident, also from
Transylvania and recorded in 1736, is found in the journal of a
landowner who entered the details of the recapture of an escaped
Gypsy slave as follows:

At my dear wife's request, I had him beaten with rods

on the soles of his feet until the blood ran, then made
him bathe his feet in strong caustic. Afterwards, for
unbecoming language, I had his upper lip cut off and
roasted, and forced him to eat it (Anon., 1912:45).

The case of a free Gypsy in Transylvania selling himself for life

to one General Farkas Macskasy for "fifteen florins, a horse,
three and a half bushels of wheat and four cups of wine" is on
record from 1755 (Ursutsiu, 1974).

43
When Gypsies first reached Hungary, their experience was similar
to that in Moldavia and Wallachia. King Mathias authorised the
City of Harmannstadt to employ them as slave labor in 1476; since
they were slaves of the Crown, they were distributed in this way
throughout the land, most often employed in blacksmithing and the
manufacture of weapons and implements of torture.

In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Gypsies were also made the

property of the landowners. Certain individuals were given
administrative positions by them, as shown in the following
document, a letter originally written in Hungarian and dated
October 25th, 1776, which permitted its bearer to collect taxes
from other Gypsies. The original remains in a private collection
in Nashaud, in Rumania:

You are strictly enjoined by the present letter that

such State Gypsies as have hitherto been under your
authority, and in addition the Gypsies Dombi Stoika,
Adam Stoika, Samu Stoika and Adam Cuka, shall remain
under your command. It is your duty also to collect
tax-money for haymaking and the quota which in virtue
of the conscription list is due to His Majesty ... the
holder of this document, Dimitru Borcza, Gornik ...
must not impose anything on, nor exact anything from,
the four guilder Gypsy tax (Lebzelter, 1933: 213-214).

[Illustration with caption]

"Imagination will easily conceive how dismal and horrid the
inside of such Gipsey huts must be to civilised humanity. Air and
daylight excluded, very damp, and full of filth, they have more
the appearance of wild beasts'dens, than of the habitations of
intelligent beings. Rooms or separate apartments are not even
thought of, all is one open space: in the middle is the fire,
serving both for the purpose of cooking and warmth; the father
and mother lie half naked, the children entirely so, round it.
Chairs, tables, beds or bedsteads, find no place here; they sit,
eat, sleep on the bare ground, or at most spread an old blanket
or, in the Banat, a sheepskin, under them. Every fine day the
door is set open for the sun to shine in, which they continue
watching so long as it is above the horizon; when the day closes,
they shut their door and consign themselves over to rest. When
the weather is cold, or the snow prevents them opening the door,
they make up the fire, and sit round it till they fall asleep,
without any more light than it affords. The furniture and
property of the Gipseys ... consist of an earthen pot, an iron
pan, a spoon, a jug and a knife; when it happens that everything
is complete, they sometimes add a dish; these serve for the whole
family" (Grellman, 1807:34-35).
During the reign of Empress Maria Theresa (1717-1780), daughter
of the Hapsburg King Charles VI, measures were taken to settle
and assimilate the Gypsy population: they were conscripted into
the army, and forbidden to speak Romani or call themselves Rom
(they were instead referred to as Uj Magyar, "New Hungarians").
The children were sent to school, and their parents were no
longer allowed to pursue any of the traditional occupations. The
means of achieving this were sometimes quite cruel and ruthless;
no regard was paid at all to Romani values or culture, and the
forced assimilation was seen by the Gypsies themselves as an
effort to exterminate them as a distinct people. Violent
anti-Gypsyism from the Hungarian people continued to be a fact of
life, however, and Gypsies increasingly became scapegoats for the
most insignificant of charges. The more imaginative crimes of
vampirism and cannibalism were also attributed to them: In 1782
some forty were broken on the rack and cut into pieces because
they were accused of roasting and eating several dozen Hungarian
peasants, even though Maria Theresa's successor, Joseph II
subsequently proclaimed that the charges were baseless. The
policy of assimilation was not a success.

The government of Catherine the Great of Russia during this same

period (1729-1796) passed laws to make Gypsies Slaves of the
Crown (Clébert, 1963:74)*. The earliest, and most complete
firsthand account of Gypsies in Europe two hundred years ago is
found in the works of Edward Daniel Clarke, who describes the
Gypsies in Russia thus:

In their dress, they lavish all their finery upon their

heads. Their costume in Russia is very different to
that of the natives. The Russians hold them in great
contempt; never speaking of them without abuse; and
feel themselves contaminated by their touch, unless it
be to have their fortunes told. Formerly they were more
scattered over Russia, and paid no tribute; but now
they are collected, and all belong to one nobleman, to
whom they pay a certain tribute, and work among the
number of his slaves (1800:208).

The circumstances of the post-abolition migration of the Russian

Gypsies to the Americas is discussed in Chapter XIV.

While the eastern European states were enslaving and otherwise

making use of Gypsies as a source of labor within their own
territories, countries in western Europe were attempting to rid
their soil of Gypsies altogether.

45
 *The name for these slaves is given as Slaves of the Crown.
Professor Victor Friedman tells me, however, that this is a
religious term in Russian for "human beings" (lit. "slaves of the
lord").

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Pariah Syndrome

VII. Treatment Elsewhere in Europe:
Spain, Portugal and France

In 1568, Pope Pius V attempted to drive all Gypsies from the

domain of the Roman Catholic Church; similar expulsion orders
were already in effect in individual countries, resulting in an
ongoing shuffling back and forth of Gypsy populations between
them. With the maritime expansion, and the establishment of a
colonial plantation economy, however, a way was finally found to
clear Gypsies out of western Europe more efficiently.

The Spanish were the first Europeans to convey Gypsies to the

Americas, although a reference dated February 11th, 1581,
indicates that the earliest made their way there on their own.
Referring to Charcas Province in Peru (corresponding to part of
present-day Bolivia), it tells of Gypsies who had "passed
secretly to some parts of our Indies [and ...] who go about with
their native dress and language...among the Indians, whom they
dupe easily, on account of their simplicity" ("pasado a algunas
partes de las Nuestras Yndias xitanos ... que andan en su traxe y
lengua ... entre los yndios, a los quales por su simplicad
engañan con facilidad"). (Colección, 1872:138-139). Ironically,
this early document asked that those Gypsies be rounded up and
returned to Spain, although that country had begun ordering their
expulsion as early as 1499. Before that, it had briefly
considered attempting their assimilation into the Spanish
population, possibly because a labor force was needed to replace
the expelled Moors and Jews (Alfaro, 1982).

Evidence that Gypsies could be made the property, for perpetuity,

of Spanish citizens in the sixteenth century is found in a
document published in Valladolid in 1538:

Gypsies are not to move about these kingdoms, and those

that may be there, are to leave them, or take trades,
or live with their overlords under penalty of a hundred
lashes for the first time, and for the second time that
their ears be cut off, and that they be chained for
sixty days, and that for the third time that they
remain captive forever to them who take them. Decree of
 their Highnesses given in the year 1499, and Law No.104
in the Decrees; confirmed and ordered to be observed in
the court which was celebrated in Toledo in the year
1525, Law No.58, in spite of any clause which may have
been given to the contrary (de Celso, 1538).

Moraes (1886), Coelho (1892) and more recently Couto (1973) and
Locatelli (1981) have all documented the shipment of Gypsies out
of Portugal. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Ciganos were being
sent to work in the Portuguese colonies in South America, Africa
and India. One can only imagine how the latter individuals must
have reacted upon finding themselves in the land of their
ancestors. Boxer mentions briefly the victimization of

entire communities of Gypsies, against whom King John V

seems to have conceived an obsessive hatred, for no
reason that I can discover. These unfortunates of all
ages, and both sexes were shipped off in successive
levies to Brazil and Angola, without any specific
charge being brought against them, in a (largely
futile) attempt to banish the Romany race from Portugal
altogether (1969:314).

It was in this particular respect that the trans-Atlantic

shipment of the Africans differed from that of Gypsies: the
former were transported for economic reasons; the latter, for
reasons of hate.

A decree which came into effect in August, 1685, redirected the

shipments from the African settlements at Cabinda, Quicombo and
Mossamedes to Maranhão, a vast colony to the north of Brazil. In
1718, the Brazilian city of Bahia became the central offloading
point for Gypsies from Portugal. The governor was ordered at that
time to make it illegal for Gypsies to speak Romani or to teach
it to their children, in order that it should quickly become
extinct:

Foram degrados os ciganos do reino para a praça da

cidade da Bahia, ordinando-se ao governador que ponha
cobro a cuidado na prohibição do uso da sua lingua e
giria, não permitindo que se ensine a seus filhos, a
fim de obter-se a sua extincção (Moraes, 1886:24).

Expulsion orders in France go back to 1427, but were applied only

sporadically at that early date. By 1560, Gypsies were being

47
ordered to leave that country at once, or be committed to the
galleys, a practice which was also in effect in Spain at that
time. In 1682, Louis XIV ordered bailiffs throughout France to

arrest, and cause to be arrested, all those who are

called Bohemians or Egyptians ... to secure the men to
the convicts' chain to be led to our galleys and to
serve there in perpetuity, [and as for the women, they
were to be] flogged and banished out of the kingdom;
all this without any other form of trial (de
Fréminville, 1775:305).

Gypsies were probably reaching North America within two or three

decades after this order was effected; Jones, writing of these
transportees from France, says that

There is a colony of 'Gypsies' on Biloxi Bay in

Louisiana [now in Mississippi] who were brought over
and colonized by the French at a very early period of
the first settlement of the state [i.e., ca.1700]. They
are French 'Gypsies' and speak the French language,
they call themselves 'Egyptians' or 'Gypsies'
(1834:189).

Olmsted provides a further interesting account of Gypsies in

French North America, in the form of a conversation with a local
planter while he was visiting Louisiana:

I afterwards spent the night at the house of a white

planter, who told me that, when he was a boy, he had
lived at Alexandria. It was then under the Spanish
rule, and 'the people they was all sorts. They was
French and Spanish, and Egyptian and Indian, and
Mulattoes and Niggers'. 'Egyptians?'. 'Yes, there was
some of the real old Egyptians there then'. 'Where did
they come from?. 'From some of the Northern islands'.
'What language did they speak?. 'Well, they had a
language of their own, which some of 'em used among
themselves, Egyptian, I suppose it was, but they could
talk in French and Spanish too'. 'What color were
they?. 'They was black, but not very black. Oh! they
was citizens, as good as any. They passed for white
folks'. 'Did they keep close by themselves, or did they
intermarry with white folks?. 'They married mulattoes
mostly, I believe. There was heaps of Mulattoes in
 Alexandria then-free niggers-their fathers was French
and Spanish men, and their mothers right black niggers.
Good many of them had Egyptian blood in 'em too ...'
The Egyptians were probably Spanish Gypsies; though I
have never heard of any of them being in America in any
other way (1861:638).

The population Olmsted refers to were probably from France rather

than Spain as he suggests, and related to the earlier
transportees mentioned by Jones. Spanish shipments to Louisiana,
their solución americana, part of a proclamation issued in 1749,
is discussed by Alfaro (1982:318,329).

Roma had already been transported out of Spain with Columbus on

his third voyage in 1498 (Wilford, 1984:C1,3; Lyon, 1986:604),
and were similarly expelled during the time of the Inquisition
(Ortega, 1985). A mixed Afro-Romani community lives near
Atchefalaya in St. Martin Parish, some seventy-five miles
south-east of Alexandria, though it shuns social intercourse with
the surrounding black, white and American Indian populations, as
well as with the Vlax and Romanichal Gypsies who live in the
state.

A further account from the same region from about 1780 of another
mixed Romani population, though here with the local Indians, is
found in Milfort (1802:39):

On leaving Mobile, I went to Paskagola. The inhabitants

of this village are very lazy; but, since they have
little ambition, they are happy, and lead a completely
tranquil life. They are for the most part Gypsy men who
married Indian women; there are a few French Creole men
among them. They are all carpenters and build schooners
with which they engage in coasting trade in Mobile Bay,
at New Orleans, and at Pantsakole.

Cuban anthropologist Dr. Beatrice Morales-Cozier of Georgia State

University in Atlanta is working with another mixed
African-Romani community which lives in the interior of her own
country.

On July 30th, 1749, King Ferdinand VI ordered the wholesale

redada or arrest of all Roma throughout Spain, in order to
"extinguish once and for all" this population which had "infected
(his domains) for so many years." Many where imprisoned; others
were sent by sea to La Coruña on English and Swedish vessels
"with the loss of many people" (Alfaro, 1993:103).

49
 On November 22nd, 1802, the Prefect of the department of Basses
Pyrenees, M. de Castellane, issued an order calling for measures
to be taken "to purge the country of Gypsies"; subsequently, ...
on the night of December 6th, the date set by the Prefect, all of
the Gypsies throughout the Basque Country were rounded up, as
though in a net, and were taken via various depots to ships which
put them off on the coast of Africa. "This vigorous measure
which, on being put into effect, brought all the approval which
humanity and justice could muster," said a writer of the time,
and "was a veritable kindness to the Department" (Michel,
1857:136).

In an unsigned article which appeared in the first issue of the

Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society (1888:54), it was suggested
that the Lowbey people of the Senegambia may be the descendants
of these transportees; they are said never to marry out of their
community, are reputed to have come from somewhere far away, and
to be cursed to keep on the move for stealing. They make a living
from carving wooden utensils for sale, and in an earlier article
in the Archaeological Review (Hartland, 1888:15), they are
referred to as "the Gypsies of the Gambia." Michel's report does
not give the destination of the French ships, but it seems
unlikely that they would have traveled as far south along the
African coast as the Gambia before disembarking their human
cargo. There is a town on the Senegambian coast, however, called
Ziguinchor (pronounced "ziganshor") whose name, it has been
suggested, may derive from Tzigane. Lespinasse (1863:42) had
earlier suggested that those vessels may not in fact have left
European waters, but might instead have been waylaid off the
French coast by a British naval blockade and returned to shore.

[Illustration with caption]

French court order dated 1612 ordering all Gypsies out of France

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Pariah Syndrome

VIII. Treatment Elsewhere in Europe: Germany

In the Hanseatic townships of mediaeval Germany, Gypsies were

subject to the extremely rigid laws which affected all the
inhabitants during that period. Many were imprisoned, for
example, for not being on the taxpayer's register, or for not
having a fixed address or steady employment. Because of their
circumstances, Gypsies were especially vulnerable, and many
sought refuge in the forests to escape these penalties. The
difficulty of maintaining a livelihood under such conditions, and
the harshness of the northern European winters, together with the
steadily increasing harrassment of Gypsies in particular, reduced
their numbers in Germany drastically within the first few years.

Those who remained were subject to growing persecution; in the

museum in the Ancient Free City of Nördlingen may be seen many of
the implements of torture used against the Gypsies in Germany,
and a placard showing a Gypsy, whose flesh had been whipped from
his body before being taken to the gallows, bearing the words
"Punishment for Gypsies and their women found in this country."
In 1726, Charles VI passed a law that any male Gypsy found in the
country was to be killed instantly, while Gypsy women and
children had their ears cut off, and were whipped all the way to
the border. Gypsy hunting was a common sport; in 1826, Freiherr
von Lenchen displayed his trophies publicly: the severed heads of
a Gypsy woman and her child. In 1835, a Rheinish aristocrat
entered into his list of kills "A Gypsy woman and her suckling
babe."

The first academic treatment of Gypsies was written by the German

ethnographer Heinrich Grellmann in 1783, upon whose research all
later scholarship was built. With few exceptions, 19th century
studies reflected the distaste and prejudices of their authors;
Grellmann himself admitted to feeling "an evident repugnancy,
like a biologist dissecting some nauseating, crawling thing in
the interests of science" while doing his fieldwork ("ein
offensichtlicher Widerwille wie der eines Naturwissenschaftlers,
der ein ekelerregendes Kriechtier im Interesse der Wissenschaft
seziert"; 1783:7). His contemporary, the Lithuanian minister M.
Zippel, wrote that "Gypsies in a well-ordered state in the
present day are like vermin on an animal's body" ("Zigeuner in
einem guten geordneten Staat während der gegenwärtigen Zeit, sind
wie Schädlinge an der Körper eines Tieres"1793:148). In the 20th
century, Martin Block exhibited much the same attitude. He could
not help experiencing "an involuntary feeling of mistrust, or
repulsion, in their presence" ("ein unfreiwilliges Gefühl des
Misstrauens oder des Widerwillens in ihrer Gegenwart"; 1936:16).

[Illustration with caption]

"Punishment for Gypsies and their women found in this country"
Nördlingen, 1700

This detached attitude is not unusual among those who specialize

in Gypsy Studies; in his foreword to the 1963 reprint of Groome's
Gypsy Folk Tales, the late Walter Starkie drew attention to this:

[Groome's] experiences with the majority of

Gypsiologists in Germany and elsewhere left him

51
 dissatisfied, for he discovered that they were not
interested in frequenting the Gypsy camps or talking to
the Romanichals; all their interest was concentrated
upon Romani, as though it were a dead language like
ancient Greek (Groome, 1963:v).

It has nevertheless been German scholarship in this area, more

than any other, that has provided the foundation for modern
Romanological studies. Grellmann's work attracted a number of
Indianists, who became interested in Romani and who made passing
references to its genealogy in their work. Such scholars included
Schlegel, Bopp and Jülg. Contemporary with them was a handful of
Romanologues who were publishing descriptions of specific
dialects of European Romani: Bischoff, von Heister, Puchmeyer and
Graffunder among them. In 1844, Augustus Pott produced the first
scientific historical and comparative study of the language, for
which he has come to be regarded as the father of Romani
linguistics; this work was supplemented by the research of
Ascoli, also writing in German, and in the 1870s and 1880s Franz
Miklosich produced the first etymological and dialectological
studies. A number of 19th-century German Indo-Europeanists cut
their philological teeth on Romani, although its study today
remains, as then, marginal.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Pariah Syndrome

IX. German Treatment of Gypsies
in the Twentieth Century

"You talked about Auschwitz. My name is Gustav Wexler.

I know about Auschwitz. "
"Mr. Morris, my name is Mrs. Hersh. May I say
something? Israel was bought and paid for with the
blood of six million martyrs ... Why do you think the
Jews should be the only people without a homeland?"'
"Do I think that? On the other hand, Mrs. Hersh, where
is the homeland of the Gypsies? What did their blood
buy and pay for?"
"Gypsies? ", Wexler said. "What's Gypsies got to do
with it?"
"Half a million Gypsies also died in the concentration
camps, "Adam said. "Doesn't that even earn them a
couple of fields? One caravan site with running water?
A day trip to a stately home? Nothing?"'
"The Gypsies, " Wexler said, "have no historic
homeland.
 "Ah. That must be where they made their big mistake. "
"The Gypsies, "Mrs. Hersh said, "what culture have the
Gypsies got?"
"No culture?" Adam said. "To hell with them."
"Mr. Speaker, " Wexler said, "may I ask you something?
Because can you give me the names of ten famous
Gypsies?" (Raphael, 1977:253-254).

Towards the end of the 19th century, a conference on "The Gypsy

Filth" (Der Zigeunerunrat) was held in Swabia, and plans were
made to round up all Gypsies throughout the German-controlled
territories. A system was proposed whereby bells would be rung in
villages as a means of signalling their presence. This led to the
later establishment, in Munich in 1899, of the Central Office for
Fighting the Gypsy Nuisance (Zentrale zur Bekämpfung des
Zigeunerunwesens), under the direction of Alfred Dillman. This
bureau was not officially closed down until 1970.

Long before the Nazis came to power, the Gypsies had

been treated as social outcasts. Their foreign
appearance, their strange customs and language, their
nomadic way of life and lack of regular employment had
increasingly come to be regarded as an affront to the
norms of a modern state and society. They were seen as
asocial, a source of crime, culturally inferior, a
foreign body within the nation. During the 1920s the
police, first in Bavaria and then in Prussia
established special offices to keep the Gypsies under
constant surveillance. They were photographed and
fingerprinted as if they were criminals. With the Nazi
takeover, however, a new motive was added to the
grounds for persecution: their distinct and allegedly
inferior racial character (Noakes, 1985:17).

When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, his Nazi administration

inherited anti-Gypsy laws which had already been in force in
Germany since the Middle Ages. The January 20th edition of Le
Temps that same year carried the following story (see also
Shoemaker, 1933:158-160):

Gypsy Island

According to the Viennese papers, mayors in the

district of Oberwarth, in Burgenland, have today
examined the question of the Gypsies who, they claim,
have become a veritable plague in the country. They

53
 maintain that the Gypsies are multiplying three or four
times more rapidly than the indigenous population ...
These mayors want to withhold civil rights from the
Gypsies, and institute the same kinds of laws against
them as exist in Hungary, which include in particular
clubbing, in cases of theft. The mayors have endorsed a
proposal made by the District Prefect that the Société
de Nations be invited to examine the establishment of a
Gypsy colony on one of the Polynesian islands.

During the first few months of Nazi rule, an SS study group

proposed that all Gypsies then in Germany should be killed by
drowning them in ships taken out into mid-ocean and sunk. There
were not, at that time, any anti-Jewish laws in effect, and in
fact the Weimar Constitution of 1918 had reaffirmed the equality
of Jews with other Germans in that year (Gilbert, 1947:493).
Instead, the authorities in the Research Center for Racial
Hygiene and Biological Population Studies began a lengthy process
of codifying persons of Romani origin (dealt with in the recent
novels of the Romani Holocaust by Ramati (1985) and Florence
(1985); the novels of Kosinsky (1965) and Kanfer (1978) also deal
with the same theme). On September 15th, 1935, Gypsies became
subject to the restrictions of the Nuremberg Law for the
Protection of Blood and Honor, which forbade intermarriage or
sexual intercourse between Aryan and non-Aryan peoples (Noakes,
loc. cit.). Criteria for classification as a Gypsy were twice as
strict as those later applied to Jews: if two of a person's eight
great-grandparents were even part-Gypsy, that person had too much
Gypsy ancestry to be allowed, later, to live. The Nuremberg
decree on the the other hand defined a Jew as being minimally a
person having one Jewish grandparent, i.e. as someone who was one
quarter Jewish (Hilberg, 1961). If the criteria applied to the
Jews had also been applied to the Gypsies, nearly 20,000 Gypsy
victims would have escaped being murdered by the Nazis (Kenrick
and Puxon, 1972). The subsequent classificatory treatment of Jews
was in fact derived from, and patterned upon, those developed for
the Romani population. An article which appeared in the British
press on the eve of the Second World War included the prophetic
words "In case Hitler is interested, they are pure Aryan"
(Sulzberger, 1939:7).

[Illustration with caption]

Document dated December 12th, 1925, calling for a joint
conference to discuss the "Gypsy problem"

Eva Justin, one of those concerned with compiling genealogical

data of this sort was, after the war, employed as a social worker
and never prosecuted. In her treatise on Gypsies, she expressed
the hope that her research would prevent any further flow of such
"unworthy primitive elements" into the German nation. Her
companion during the war, Dr. Hermann Arnold, remains today a
respected 'Gypsy expert', and until recently was a consultant on
Gypsies with the Ministry of Family Affairs in Bonn.

Some Gypsies were sterilized as early as 1933, though no Jews had

yet been; beginning in the same year, camps were being
established by the Nazis to contain Gypsies at Dachau,
Dieselstrasse, Mahrzan and Vennhausen, although at so early a
date, Jewish victims were not being sent en masse to any camps.
It is a matter of singular disgrace that, in 1936, the anti-Gypsy
campaign became globalized, through the establishment of the
International Center for the Fight against the Gypsy Menace by
Interpol, in Vienna, which today has branches in 138 countries.
Again, this did not happen for the Jews. In effect, the Nazi
Party sought, and was given, the cooperation of other European
governments in its campaign to locate and identify Gypsies
throughout Europe for its later plans for extermination.

In 1938, a Nazi Party proclamation stated that the Gypsy problem

was categorically a matter of race ("mit Bestimmtheit eine Frage
der Rasse"), and was to be dealt with in that light; a year
later, Johannes Behrendt, speaking for the Party, declared that
"elimination without hesitation" ("Austossung ohne Zögern") of
the entire Gypsy population had to be instigated immediately,
although a number of families were to be kept in a compound for
future anthropologists to be able to study. Among the many
categories of victims in Hitler's Germany, only the Gypsies and
the Jews were singled out for annihilation on racial grounds,
only Jews and Gypsies being considered genetically so "manifestly
tainted" as to pose a threat to German racial purity.

[Illustration with caption]

German police interrogating Gypsies, 1925

[Illustration with caption]

Document entitled "The Fight Against the Gypsy Nuisance" dated
July 6th, 1927, dealing with their incarceration

[Illustration with caption]

A Gypsy transport awaiting departure, 1938

[At the U.S. Government War Crimes Tribunal] Ohlendorf

... told Musmanno that he did his duty as best he could
at all times. Asked if he killed other than Jews,
Ohlendorf admitted he did: Gypsies.

"On what basis did you kill Gypsies?."

"It was the same as for Jews," he replied.

55
 "Racial? blood?."
Ohlendorf shrugged his shoulders. "There was no
difference between Gypsies and Jews" (Infield,
1982:61).

In July, 1938, the machinery of the Endlösung or Final Solution

was put into effect with the transportation of a group of Gypsies
to Berlin. During the following months, transportations to the
camps in Poland began, but were later stopped because of the
expense involved, and the need to use the trains for moving
German weapons and troops to the Eastern Front. Gypsies in
Poland and the Baltic States, Austria, Czechoslovakia, France,
Italy, Hungary and the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe were herded
into camps for later extermination, though others were frequently
dispatched on the spot. The treatment given to a Gypsy mother and
her young daughter by a group of soldiers in northern Jugoslavia
is not untypical:

First the girl was forced to dig a ditch, while her

mother, seven months pregnant, was left tied to a tree.
With a knife they opened the belly of the mother, took
out the baby, and threw it in the ditch. Then they
threw in the mother and the girl after raping her. They
covered them with earth while they were still alive
(Paris, 1962:62).

The effectiveness of Hitler's campaign of genocide ensured that

there were almost no Gypsy writers who survived the War, and
because Gypsies have been overlooked since then, it has been hard
for chroniclers to piece together this story; they have had
largely to rely upon the accounts of Jewish and other survivors
for their information. A man named Grabów who escaped from the
death camp at Chelmno was able to get a letter through to his
relatives telling of the atrocities being perpetrated against
Gypsies there:

... The place where everyone is being put to death is

called Chelmno, not far from Dabie; people are kept in
the nearby forest of Lochów. People are killed in one
of two ways: either by shooting or by poison gas. This
is what happened to the towns of Dabie, Izbica
Kujawska, and others. Recently, thousands of Gypsies
have been brought there from the so-called Gypsy camp
in Lodz, and the same is done to them ... (Dobroszycki,
1984:xxi, letter dated January 19th, 1942).
[Illustration with caption]
Families awaiting deportation, 1939

[Illustration with caption]

Document from the Oberbürgermeister of Hannover stating that the
city did not want to serve as a Gypsy detention center, April
1st, 1939

[Illustration with caption]

Gypsy families in Auschwitz

Shoshana Kalisch was a survivor of the Lodz concentration camp,

and tells of sharing it with Gypsies brought there from Austria:

The Gypsies did not last long. Left without food for
days, they were tortured sadistically by their special
guards, who often forced them to do gymnastics until
they collapsed or died ... The Nazi commander ordered
squads of Jews to bury the Gypsies in the Jewish
cemetery. Surviving Gypsies were deported to Auschwitz
... when we were deported to Auschwitz, my sister and I
were assigned to a barracks of "C" compound at
Birkenau, adjacent to the camp in which the Gypsies
were detained ... One night in early August, we heard
spine-chilling shrieks coming from the Gypsy camp,
augmented by the sound of trucks coming and going and
the ferocious barking of dogs. The elder in charge of
our barracks told us that the Gypsies were being taken
away. The sound of the trucks, the barking of the dogs,
and the screaming and wailing of the Gypsies permeated
our camp throughout the night.

We held onto our shoes, our only possessions aside from

the single garment on our bodies, ready to run - which
would of course have been useless - expecting in silent
terror to be the next ones taken away. Feeling only my
sister's and my heartbeats, I made up my mind not to
scream when they came for us. The Gypsies, I thought,
had been screaming for me too (Kalisch, 1985:87-88).

Shoshana Kalisch (op. cit.) also reproduces a song which was

written about the Gypsies in her camp. "Strictly quarantined and
isolated from the rest of the ghetto, the Gypsies were easily
ignored or forgotten," she says. "Thus it is all the more
touching to hear a song describing the Gypsies' plight by the
Lodz, ghetto musician David Beigelman." Beigelman died of
exhaustion in a slave labor camp just three months before

57
liberation:

Tsigaynerlid

Finster di nakht, vi koyln shvarts,

Nor trakht un trakht, un s'klapt mayn harts.
Mir Tsigayner lebn vi keyner,
Mir laydn noyt, genug koym oyf broyt.

Dzum dzum dzum,

Mir flien arum vi di tshaykes,
Dzum dzum dzum,
Mir shpiln oyf di balalaykes.

Nit vu men togt, nit vu men nakht;

A yeder zikh plogt, nor kh'trakht un trakht.
Mir Tsigayner lebn vi keyner,
Mir laydn noyt, genug koym oyf broyt.

Dzum dzum dzum,

Mir flien arum vi di tshaykes,
Dzum dzum dzum,
Mir shpiln oyf di balalaykes.

Gypsy Song*

Dark is the night, like blackest coal.

I brood and brood, my heartbeats toll.
We Gypsies live like no no others do,
Suffering pain, and hunger too.

Dzum dzum dzum,

Like seagulls we fly near and far,
Dzum dzum dzum,
We're strumming our Gypsy guitar.

Nowhere to stay, almost no food;

Everyone struggles, but I just brood.
We Gypsies live like no others do,
Suffering pain, and hunger too.

Dzum dzum dzum,

Like seagulls we fly near and far,
Dzum dzum dzum,
We're strumming our Gypsy guitar.

Rromani Dzhili
 Tunjariko e rjat, angar kalo,
Nekezhi' ma, marel o jilo;
Trajin el Rrom sar nisave
Rrevdin e dukh, sa bokhale.

Dzum dzum dzum

Sar macharki pash-dural hurjas,
Dzum dzum dzum
Amare levuci rromane bashas.

Chi beshav katende, kak manaj te xav,

Saorre chingarel, 'ma man te nekezhisavav;
Trajin el Rrom sar nisave
Rrevdiv e dukh, sa bokhale.

Dzum dzum dzum

Sar macharki pash-dural hurjas,
Dzum dzum dzum
Amare levuci rromane bashas.

*English translation of the original Yiddish by S. Kalisch,

Romani translation by the author. The score for this song may be
found in Kalisch, op. cit., pp. 89-90.

[Illustration with caption]

Document dated August 31st, 1938, dealing with the problem of
finding locations in which to confine Gypsies

In 1942, information on the Gypsy population of England, Sweden

and Spain began to be collected in anticipation of eventual Nazi
takeover of those countries. In Germany itself, large-scale
roundups were established by February, 1943, and by April over
ten thousand Gypsies had arrived in Sachsenhausen where they were
put to work. Conditions in these and other concentration camps
are painfully described in Kenrick and Puxon (1972), which also
recounts the terrible medical experiments which were carried out
on Gypsies, especially upon young girls. Twins were also selected
for experimentation; the "Angel of Death," Joseph Mengele, used
Gypsy children in particular for his research. One Gypsy
survivor, Hans Braun, who now lives in Canada remembers Mengele
and his experiments at Auschwitz, where on just one day, August
1st, 1944, four thousand Gypsies were dispatched to their deaths.
Braun has an especially vivid recollection:

I remember very well how he gave a small Gypsy boy of

five or six an injection with a needle about 30
centimetres long. He stuck the needle into the boy's
back to extract the spinal fluid; he stuck it up to the
neck vertebrae. The needle broke, and it didn't take

59
 long for the child to die. Behind the building there
was a kind of butcher's block with a trough for blood,
like a wash basin ... Mengele cut the child open from
the neck to the genitals, dissecting the body, and took
out the innards to experiment on them. This was
something I will not forget (Tyrnauer, 1985b:7).

A Jewish survivor, Vera Alexander, had the job of supervising

fifty sets of Gypsy twins in the same camp. She describes an
incident which took place in 1943:

I remember one set of twins in particular: Guido and

Nina, aged about four. One day, Mengele took them away.
When they returned, they were in a terrible state -
they had been sewn together, back to back, like Siamese
twins. Their wounds were infected and oozing pus.They
screamed day and night. Then their parents - I remember
their mother's name was Stella - managed to get hold of
some morphine, and they killed their children in order
to end their suffering. Soon after that, I was taken to
another camp, and the Gypsy camp was entirely
liquidated (Davis, 1985:23).

[Illustration with caption]

Translation of a letter written by Gauleiter Portschy of
Steiermark calling for the enforced sterilization of Gypsies,
January 9th, 1938

Nineteen-forty-three was also the year Himmler decided that the

Gypsy camps were to be done away with, and so began a program of
liquidation which was ultimately to destroy over half a million
Romani lives. Gypsies were beaten and clubbed to death, herded
into the gas chambers and forced to dig their own graves and jump
into them. In Lithuania, a thousand Gypsies were locked inside a
synagogue, which was then burnt to the ground killing them all.
Children had their heads smashed by being swung by the feet
against a wall. One eyewitness account tells of Gypsies screaming
through the night in anguish, waiting to be murdered. It is
ironic that the Romani word sastipe, the general greeting for
health and luck, should have the same Sanskrit root (svastha)
from which the word Swastika is also derived.

An account of the punishment meted out to one Gypsy who tried to

escape from Dachau, is found in Kogon:

He was locked in a large box with iron bars over the

 opening. Inside, the prisoner could only hold himself
in a crouching position. Koch (the camp commander) then
had big nails driven through the planks so that each
movement of the prisoner made them stick in his body.
Without food or water, he spent two days and three
nights in this position. On the morning of the third
day, having already gone insane, he was given an
injection of poison (1950:102).

[Illustration with caption]

Auschwitz: Gypsies dig their own graves

Manfri Wood, a Gypsy serving with the British Royal Air Force,
told of his first impressions as a member of a liberation team
entering Belsen after the collapse of the Third Reich:

We faced something terrible. Heaps of unburied bodies,

and an unbearable stench. When I saw the surviving
Romanies, with young children among them, I was shaken.
Then I went over to the ovens, and found on one of the
steel stretchers the half-charred body of a girl, and I
understood in one awful minute what had been going on
there (Kenrick and Puxon, 1972:187).

Since the end of the Second World War, little of benefit has been
achieved from the Gypsy point of view. Not a single Gypsy was
called upon to testify at the Nuremberg Trials, or has been to
any of the subsequent war crime tribunals.

The downfall of the Third Reich did not halt the

devaluation of Gypsy lives. Though West Germany paid
nearly $715 million to Israel and various Jewish
organizations, Gypsies as a group received nothing ...
[although] Gypsy activists have uncovered a case of a
woman who received ten dollars for the death of her
baby in Auschwitz.

West German officials have rejected the efforts of

several thousand Gypsy survivors of the War to
establish citizenship in the Federal Republic, even
though their families have lived in Germany for
Generations (Anon., 1979:67).

Romani Rose, Vice President of the World Romani Union and its
most vigorous activist, has been trying, so far without success,

61
to obtain compensation from a number of German companies for
their use of Gypsies as slave labor in Nazi Germany:

Seven companies have paid more than 58 million marks

($29 million) to Jewish forced laborers and their
families. Rose, 39, was interviewed in the offices of
the Gypsy Central Council in Heidelberg. He said
"absolutely none" of the Gypsies have been paid so far
... Rose said 700 German Gypsies have notified him of
claims for slave labor, but he added that the number
could rise to 1,000. He estimated that up to 15,000
Gypsy survivors of the Nazi forced-labor program are in
Germany and Austria alone. One of those, Hugo Franz,
said at the press conference: "Prisoners died like
flies from breathing in poison gas. Civilian workers
and SS guards both beat us. Many of the prisoners went
blind from the poison gas; we went for days without
sleep." The Gypsies have named 11 companies for which
they say members of the Sinti and Roma were forced to
work during the Nazi era. Rose said demands had been
sent to all of them. Among companies Rose named was the
Daimler-Benz car and truck manufacturer (Costelloe,
1986:3A).

***

Since the mid-1970s, representatives of various Gypsy

organizations have been in conference with Herr Willy Brandt and
Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in an attempt to claim reparation
amounting to $365 million. Stimulated in part by Jewish
activists, Gypsies are pressing more and more openly for
recognition of their plight. In October, 1979, 2,000 Gypsies
marched to Bergen-Belsen where thousands died between 1939 and
1945. Today, there is a growing acknowledgement of the Gypsy
situation among German scholars (e.g. Günther, 1985), although
prejudice at the popular and governmental levels remains deeply
entrenched. German government spokesman Gerold Tandler, as
recently as the 1970s, called Gypsy demands for war crimes
reparations "unreasonable" and "slander[ous]" (Pond, 1980:B17),
while in 1985, the Mayor of the City of Darmstadt Günther
Metzger, told the Central Council of the German Sinti and Roma
that they had "insulted the honor" of the memory of the Holocaust
by wishing to be associated with it (Wiesenthal, 1986:6). German
Gypsies are now learning that it is to their advantage to pass as
Jews; a recently-documented example is that of a musician who

... changed his Romany name, Kroner, to Rosenberg; with

a Gypsy name, he had been out of work for months, but
 with a new Jewish name, he was highly employable. "The
German conscience is very selective," he laughed (Marre
and Charlton, 1985:196).

The Gypsies in West Germany, now numbering some 50,000 (no

population estimates have been released by the East German
government, although they are probably extremely small), live
mostly in ghettos and receive minimal schooling and health care.
In a recent government survey of German attitudes towards
Gastarbeiter and other non-indigenous groups, Gypsies were
clearly ranked at the very bottom in terms of their perceived
social worth and acceptability. "Owners of almost 90 percent of
West Germany's campsites ... have tacked up signs reading GYPSIES
FORBIDDEN. Police periodically descend upon camping Gypsies with
guard dogs and submachine guns, and force them to move on"
(ibid.). In November, 1973, a villager in Pfaffenhofen in Bavaria
opened fire upon a group of Gypsy women who had come to buy
produce from his farm, killing two and wounding a third. The
sympathies of the police were with the farmer (David, 1973:75).

[Illustration with caption]

Wax face masks made from Gypsy prisoners for Nazi anthropological
studies

[Illustration with caption]

Gypsy prisoners at Dachau

One of the most pressing issues facing American Rom is the

securing of representation on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Council. This was established in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter
to be an enduring memorial to all those who perished in Hitler's
Germany. Sixty-five individuals were appointed but, as with
Nuremberg, no Gypsies were ever approached. Elie Wiesel claimed
in his Report for the Holocaust Memorial Commission to the
President of the United States that Jews were "certainly the
first" victims of the Holocaust (1979:3), and that the Holocaust
was "essentially a Jewish event ... the Jewish people alone were
destined to be totally annihilated, they alone were totally alone
... At the same place appears the definition that "The Holocaust
was the systematic, bureaucratic extermination of six million
Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators." In the entire report,
the word Gypsy appears just once, along with Poles, Soviet
prisoners of war, Frenchmen, Serbs and Slavs as "others," in an
appendix. The total number of Romani dead is now estimated to be
some 600,000. While this amounts to a tenth of the number of
Jewish victims, in terms of the genocide of an entire people, the
proportions are nevertheless similar - a fact which has not
escaped a number of Holocaust scholars:

63
 The Nazis killed between a fourth and a third of all
Gypsies living in Europe, and as many as 70 percent in
those areas where Nazi control had been established
longest (Strom and Parsons, 1978: 220).

How many people in Britain and America today are aware

that the Gypsies of Europe were rounded up by the Nazis
and sent to their death in almost similar proportions
to the Jews? (Heger, 1980:15).

... the Gypsies had been murdered [in a proportion]

similar to the Jews; about 80 percent of them in the
area of the countries which were occupied by the Nazis
(part of a letter dated December 14th, 1984, from Simon
Wiesenthal to Elie Wiesel, protesting the exclusion of
Gypsies from the Holocaust Memorial Council).

Pressure for recognition from Gypsy groups in the United States

consistently met with indifference to begin with. When
acknowledgement was made at all, it was invariably unkind.
Professor Seymour Seigel, former chairman of the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Council, in an article which appeared in the Washington
Post questioned whether Gypsies really did constitute a distinct
ethnic population - a particularly insensitive comment when it
was because of their ethnicity Gypsies were targeted for
extermination - and called attempts to obtain representation on
the Council "cockamamie" (Grove, 1984:C4). Other journalists
reported that they were told by the Council's liaison staff that
Gypsy protesters were "cranks" and "eccentrics" (Doolittle,
1984:5). Clearly, the individuals controlling the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Council were as ignorant of the true facts of Gypsy
history as any other Americans, and their concern has contrasted
very sharply with that demonstrated by Jewish supporters in
Europe, for whom the facts are better known. Since the staff in
Washington reads the same novels and watches the same films as
the rest of the population, their biases were hardly surprising.
In July, 1985, a 167-page work by Dr. Marilyn Bonner Feingold
entitled Report on the Status of Holocaust Education in the
United States was circulated, "to bear witness and to remember
the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the millions
of others who perished at the hands of the Nazis" (p.1), but once
again, one will search in vain for the words Gypsy or Romani in
its pages. A report and bibliography on the fate of Gypsies in
the Holocaust commissioned by the Council by Tyrnauer (submitted
in February, 1985), on the other hand, had still not been
publicized or circulated a year and a half later, and according
to a letter from the Council's Executive Director Richard Krieger
to Dr. Tyrnauer, dated September 26th, 1986, there are still "no
immediate plans for its publication." Gypsies either played a
bit-part in the Holocaust, apparently, or were not a part of it
at all.

Continuing agitation from Gypsy organizations such as the World

Romani Union and the U.S. Romani Council, brought the beginnings
of a response; picketing in Washington by members of the latter
organization was covered by the press, and while the reports were
not always the most objective, public attention has been brought
to the situation. The struggle has benefitted from non-Gypsy
support also, most of it Jewish. Miriam Novitch has spoken up for
the Gypsy cause, and Simon Wiesenthal threatened to make the fact
that Gypsies were being excluded from the Council a public issue
(1985:3). Perhaps largely because of this intervention, the post
of Special Advisor on Holocaust-Related Gypsy Matters to the
Council was created in May, 1985, and a representative appointed.
But when questioned a year later why that advisor's involvement
had never once been sought, the Council's then acting director
Micah Naftalin told the Washington Post that it had only ever
been an "honorary" position (Hirschberg, 1986:A16).

New appointments to the Council were to be announced in Spring,

1986, and it was expected that one or more Gypsy representative
would be included. Naftalin and Wiesel both told the New York
Times (for January 14th, 1986, p.B4) that they "bet they would do
it." American Gypsies had been waiting since 1979 for the
situation to be redressed, and the names of eight candidates had
been submitted in 1985. The announcements were anxiously awaited.
The Rornani community was stunned when word came that the Office
of Presidential Appointments had voted not to include any Romani
representation; once again, Gypsies had been excluded. White
House spokesman Linas Kojelis told a World Romani Union
representative that Gypsies might have received more
acknowledgement if they had been a more powerful people; a
classic example of blaming the victims for the crime.

Since then, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council has taken a more
active interest in the Gypsy situation. Former acting director
Micah Naftalin has gone on record as stating that "the only other
ethnic group [besides Jews] marked also as a genocidal target was
the Gypsies" (1986:185) - the first time this fact has been
acknowledged in print by the Council. A meeting to apprise Gypsy
representatives of the Council's plans was held on May 5th, 1986,
and was well attended. In June, a representative of the Romani
Union was for the first time invited to address the whole
assembly. A ceremony to commemorate Gypsy victims of the Nazis
was held in September the same year, and a Conference called "The
Other Victims" was likewise planned for February, 1987, in which
Gypsies were asked to participate. Such separate treatment was
not well received by Gypsies, however, who argued that there was

65
 after all just one Holocaust: ande jekh than hamisajlo amaro
vushar ande'l bova, "our ashes were mingled in the ovens" - why
should that be remembered separately today?

The fact that the Rom and Sinti were Hitler's first real victims
is gradually becoming better known; but Elie Wiesel, who watched
helplessly as his father was beaten by a Gypsy Kapo in Auschwitz
(Wiesel, 1982:36-37) still felt it necessary in his address at
the Romani Day of Remembrance, to emphasize that the Jews were
nevertheless "the supreme victims" of the Third Reich, and in his
speech upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in the following
month, he made the Point that the Nazi victimization of the Jews
was "unique." At the ceremony on September 16th, Professor Wiesel
made the following statement:

I confess that I feel somewhat guilty towards our

Romani friends. We have not done enough to listen to
your voice of anguish. We have not done enough to make
other people listen to your voice of sadness. I can
promise you we shall do whatever we can from now on to
listen better (Anon., 1986b:A23).

At that ceremony, California representative, Congressman Tom

Lantos, gave his assurances that he would initiate a letter,
signed by members of the Congress and of the Senate, to be sent
to Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany, Opposition Leader
Johannes Rau, and East German Premier Erich Honecker, urging that
war crimes reparations be made to Romani survivors in those
countries (loc. cit.).

[Illustration with caption]

5,000 Gypsies were transported to this Gypsy camp in Auschwitz
from Burgenland (Austria) prior to their extermination

[Illustration with caption]

Gypsy deportation, massacres and revolt, 1939-1945 (Gilbert,
1982)

[Illustration with caption]

American Rom protest outside the Holocaust Memorial Council's
offices, Washington, July, 1984

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Pariah Syndrome

X. German and Dutch Transportations to America
Germany had been trying to rid its territories of Gypsies since
their arrival there in the early 15th century (Hancock, 1980a),
and found a convenient dumping ground in their colony in
Pennsylvania. Shoemaker (1926) wrote of the havoc caused by the
Thirty Years War which devastated the Rhineland, and which
resulted in a wave of Palatine migration: individuals who 'sold'
themselves to redemptioners for the price of their fare to
America. "This species of servitude, and the selling of emigrants
for their passage had not a few of the features about it, of
involuntary chattel slavery, and it was characterized at the time
as the'German slave trade"' (Beidelman, 1894:584, and discussed
in detail in Mühlenberg, 1741). Wright (1927:212) refers to their
also being brought to Pennsylvania by Dutch slave traders,
possibly a misinterpretation of Shoemaker, op. cit., upon whose
work his own essay was based. Shoemaker indicated that numbers of
Gypsies from Germany were indentured and shipped out during this
same period, although they were not allowed to obtain passports,
which would presumably have given them the legal means to return
to Europe - a tactic most recently employed by the Polish
government in 1981 (Michalewicz, 1982:7).

In the same article, Shoemaker described the circumstances of an

attempted passage to America:

On a number of occasions Gipsy bands endeavored to

charter whole ships at Rotterdam, but as they were
watched with the same argus-eyed authority as are
bootleggers today, their efforts were always at the
last minute frustrated. It is related that one ship,
the 'Stein-Awdler', giving it its Pennsylvania Dutch
pronunciation, got away under cover of darkness, but
during an unfavorable tide, it still lay in the harbor
at daybreak, when the papers were scrutinized and
declared invalid by the port authorities. Several boat
loads of port wardens went in pursuit, but the boats
were not to carry the unfortunate Chi-kener back to dry
land, but to order them off the ship - they were driven
overboard, men, women and children, like a plague of
rats, and had to jump out in the mud up to their
waists, and get ashore as best they could, leaving
their possessions behind, which were seized as a fine
levied against them as a body. On shore, the
mud-saturated refugees were attacked by a mob armed
with boat hooks and soundly beaten, and probably quite
a few died of their wounds and exposure afterwards
(1924:4-5).

67
 He also said that of those "hundreds of Romanies" who were able
to sell themselves in return for passage, "most of the Chi-kener
families were broken up ... as some were dumped on the
inhospitable New England coast, others in New Jersey and still
others in the Far South, instead of at the ports along the
Delaware" (1925:4).

A letter published in the National Gazette on May 19th, 1834,

tells of the indiscriminate flogging of Gypsies, called
"Yansers," in neighboring New York state, apparently as a means
of sport for whoever could afford it:

There is yet another tribe, at or near Schenectady,

called Yansers, although their patriarchal name is
Kaiser. A gentleman appointed some years ago to some
town office there, states that he found a charge of
four pound ten shillings for whipping Yansers; the
amount, being small, was allowed. A similar charge
being brought the next year, he asked what in the name
of goodness it meant? Behold, it was for chastizing
Gypsies whenever occasion presented, which was done
with impunity and for some profit ... it is supposed by
the best informed of my neighbors, that they came over
with the early settlers in the German Valley ... they
are everywhere manufacturers of baskets, brooms and
other wooden wares.

Legislation against Gypsies in this part of the country dates

from at least this time, and continues sporadically to be
enforced. In 1976 "a band of gypsies ... was arrested on entering
Washington County from neighboring Pennsylvania. Since one of the
gypsies was suspected of stealing 'a few hundred dollars' from a
Pennsylvania gas station, all the band's property was confiscated
and sold" (Logan, 1976), even though the charge was never proved.

[Illustration with caption]

Public notice dated November 22nd, 1726, stating that any Gypsies
coming into the Lordship of Overyssel (in northern Holland) would
be put to death

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Pariah Syndrome

XI. Treatment Elsewhere in Europe:
England and Scotland
An account dated 1528 claimed that there were ten thousand
Gypsies in the British Isles by that year. Two years later the
first anti-Gypsy act was passed, which stated that "hensforth no
such Psone be suffred to come within this the Kynge's Realme";
any Gypsy entering England had his property confiscated, and was
ordered to leave within two weeks. Until that time, Gypsies in
England, as elsewhere in Europe, had shown "counterfaicte
passeports" signed by state or church dignitaries requesting that
local officials allow them to pass unhindered (Acts, 1589:279)*.
An earlier record of banishment from Scotland is found in
Denmark, however, dated July, 1505, which stated that they had
been transported thence by James IV. Walter Simson, whose book
deals principally with the Scottish Romani population, writes of
Gypsies in that country during this period who were put to death
"... on the mere ground of being Egyptians ... The cruelty
exercised upon them was quite in keeping with that of reducing to
slavery the individuals" (1865:121-122). Quoting from Miller,
1775, he goes on to indicate that Gypsies employed as
coal-bearers and salters in 18th century Scotland were "in a
state of slavery or bondage ... for life, transferable with the
collieries or salt works."

One reference by Gairdner (1898, vol. xv, p.325) documents

shipment from the Lincolnshire coast to Norway in 1544; links
between Gypsies in Britain and Scandinavia during the 16th
century are dealt with in more detail by Bergman (1964:13ff.). In
1547, Edward VI instituted a law (I Edward VI, c.3) which
required that

they be seized ... and branded with a V on their

breast, and then enslaved for two years. Such slaves
could be legally chained and given only the worst food;
they could be driven to work by whips. If no master
could be found, they were to be made slaves of the
borough or hundred or employed in road work or other
public service ... if the criminals ran away or were
caught, they were to be branded with an S and made
slaves for life (Kinney, 1973:45).

By Cromwell's time in the 1600s, it had become a hanging offense

not only to be born a Gypsy, but for non-Gypsies to associate
with Gypsies. Roberts referred to this in his 1836 treatise on
the origins of the Gypsy people:

In the days of Judge Hale, thirteen of these unhappy

beings were hanged at Bury St. Edmunds, for no other
cause than that they were Gypsies; and at that time it

69
 was death without benefit of clergy for anyone to live
among them for a month (1836:112) ... In England, many
penal laws were enacted against them, and very great
numbers were executed for no other crime but being
Gypsies. At one Suffolk assize, no less than thirteen
of these poor wretches were executed, legally convicted
of being born of Gypsy parents (1836:171).

A law in the State of Maryland similarly penalizes non-Gypsies

apprehended in the company of Gypsies: "all the property of
members of any group with which [a Gypsy] may be traveling can be
confiscated and sold to pay any fine a court may levy against the
arrested Gypsy" (Logan, 1976). The same is true in Indiana, where
"it shall be ... unlawful for any person or persons associating
or consorting with any such wandering or nomadic band of Gypsies
to subsist ... having no visible means of earning a fair, honest
and reputable livelihood" (State of Indiana Statutory
Regulations, Section 1; quoted in Marchbin, 1939:151-152).

*I am entirely indebted for this reference to my colleague David

Smith, who takes full credit for discovering this important
source. It has previously been believed that the British Isles
were one of the few places in which Gypsies did not make use of
such passes.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Pariah Syndrome

XII. British Shipments to the Americas

It was widely believed during much of the 19th century that no

Gypsies had ever come to North America. Hoyland stated that
"Grellmann is of opinion, that America is the only part of the
world in which they are not known" (1816:11); Crabb confidently
wrote that while they inhabited "... many countries of Europe,
Asia and Africa ... on the continent of America alone are there
none of them found" (1831:6), and a story published in the United
States in 1843 in The Lady's Book included the remark that "...
you must be deceived! There never has been a gipsy in North
America!" (quoted in Groome, 1899:xv). As late as 1874, the
American Cyclopaedia told its readers that it was "questionable
whether a band of genuine Gipsies has ever been in America." Even
Matt Salo, who has collected the most extensive documentation of
North American British Gypsy ancestry, has stated more than once
that the "Romnichels began appearing in the U.S. in the 1850s"
only (1982:281). It is clear from existing records, however, that
those first to arrive here from Britain did so nearly two
centuries before that. Simson devotes several pages to this,
maintaining that the fact that

many Gipsies were banished to America in colonial

times, from England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland,
sometimes for merely being 'by habit and repute'
Gipsies, is beyond dispute ... Gipsies may be said to
have been in America almost from the time of its
settlement (1865:418).

Hall noted that "Thickly sprinkled with Gypsy names are the
'transportation lists', 1787-1867, reposing on the shelves of the
Public Records Office in London" (1915:281), while
Brown(1929:148) quoted one Romanichal verbatim who told him that
he remembered his grandfather telling him that his great-uncle
fought in the American Revolution in 1776. Paine's History of
East Harwich, in Vermont, mentions a Romanichal family named
Cahoon living at Grassy Pond during the mid 1700s, also referred
to briefly in Kipling's Captains Courageous (Paine, 1937:464).
But the earliest actual document known to us, dates from the time
of the administration of Oliver Cromwell's successor, his son
Richard, when the first trans-Atlantic expulsion of Gypsies was
instituted:

In 1661 'Commissions and Instructions' were issued anew

to justices and constables, by Act of Parliament, with
the view of arresting Gypsies ... a great many Gypsies
must have been deported to the British 'plantations' in
Virginia, Jamaica and Barbadoes during the second half
of the seventeenth century. That they had there to
undergo a temporary, if not 'perpetual' servitude,
seems very likely (MacRitchie, 1894:102).

A reference dated November, 1665, comments upon the motives for

indenturing Gypsies and others in this way:

The light regard paid to the personal right of

individuals was shown by a wholesale deportation of
poor people at this time to the West Indies ... out of
a desire as weel to promote the Scottish and English
plantations in Gemaica and Barbadoes for the honour of
their country, as to free the kingdom of the burden of
many strong and idle beggars, Egyptians, common and
notorious thieves, and other dissolute and looss
persons banished and stigmatised for gross crimes

71
 (Chambers, 1858:304).

In 1714, British merchants and planters applied to the Privy

Council for permission to ship Gypsies to the Caribbean, avowedly
to be used as slaves (MacRitchie, op. cit.), and in the following
year, according to a document dated January 1st, 1715,

Prisoners ... were sentenced ... to be transported to

the plantations for being [by] habit and repute gipsies
... On the said gipsies coming here the town was
brought under a burden [and] they had used endeavours
with several merchants who have ships now going abroad
[i.e., to transport them as slaves], for which they are
to receive thirteen pounds sterling (Memorabilia,
1835:424-426).

Among the family names of those individuals were Faa, Fenwick,

Lindsey, Stirling, Robertson, Ross and Yorstoun.

Gypsies, according to the legal definition which was in effect

throughout this period in England, included "all such persons not
being Fellons wandering and pretending [i.e. identifying
themselves to be Egypcians, or wandering in the Habite, Forme or
Attyre] counterfayte Egypcians" (Statutes, Eliz., 39.c.4, quoted
in Smith, 1971:109. See also Axon, 1897, passim, and Beier,
1985:58-62).

Barbados served as an entrepôt for the distribution of slaves to

other British territories in the western hemisphere for many
years. Whether ultimately bound for Virginia, Jamaica or
elsewhere, large numbers of slaves passed first of all through
that island (Hancock, 1980b). However, while the designations
Gypsy, Gypcian, Egyptian, &c., turn up in the records of
transportation located in Britain, nothing similar appears
anywhere in the documents examined in Barbados, visited for this
purpose by the writer in the Spring of 1979. These were Hotten
(1874), Nicholson (n.d.), St. Hill (1937), Anon. (1963), Headlam
(1964), Kaminkow (1967), A. Smith (I 971), Coldham (1974) and F.
Smith (1976). Nevertheless, an examination of the lists of
transportees found in these works and in the Barbados Records
indicated that a great number of individuals bearing Romanichal
(British Gypsy) surnames did in fact arrive in Barbados: the
names occurring include Boswell, Cook/Cooke, Hern/Herne/Heron,
Lee/Leek, Locke, Palmer, Penfold/Pinfold, Price, Scot/Scott,
Smith and Ward, ranging from one Pinfold to nine Boswells to over
a hundred Smiths. Only a small percentage of these were likely to
have been Gypsies, of course. Sometimes, a further clue was
provided by the county of origin of the individual, where given
(Cookes from Middlesex and Kent), or by occupation (Boswell, a
blacksmith), but these must also be considered non-conclusive.

Alexandre Exquemelin remarked upon a number of "Egyptian wenches"

among the bondservants in Tortuga, when he visited that island in
1666, but we cannot be sure that Gypsies were meant here. So far,
only one reference to Gypsies as a discrete group in the West
Indies, and referred to as such, has been located, and that from
Jamaica:

I have known many gipsies [to be] subject from the age
of eleven to thirty to the prostitution and lust of
overseers, book-keepers, negroes, &c., to be taken into
keeping by gentlemen, who paid exorbitant hire for
their use (Moreton, 1793:130).

The censuses themselves do not mention Gypsies, although Jews are

listed separately from other whites (Dunn, 1962). This omission
may not be significant, however, since the Amerindian slaves
brought in from South America, and possibly New England, are not
listed either - a fact remarked upon by Handler (1970:127).
Robert Rich, a resident of Barbados writing in 1670, noted that
the population there consisted of English, Irish, Scottish,
Dutch, French, Jewish, colored and black slaves (in Ogilby,
1671:378-379).

This leaves four possibilities: firstly, that Gypsies were

counted together with the white population, perhaps because of a
common point of origin at time of shipment, and were therefore
not officially registered separately; secondly, that most were
shipped on to the North American colonies, and did not remain
long enough in the West Indies to become a recognized,
established community; thirdly, that by some means, some of them
at least were able to return to Britain, and lastly, that the
population was ultimately bred out of existence.

Against the first stands the fact that Gypsies, being of Asian
origin, are ultimately not 'white', despite the presence in
modern times of many English-looking Romanichals, resulting from
miscegenation with Europeans. Such genetic mixture would, in any
case, have been far less apparent in the 17th century, and even
today, it would be difficult to attribute the white Barbadian's
"sickly white or light red" complexion (Price, 1962:49) to the
British Gypsy population. Furthermore, the fact that the Gypsies
who were brought to the West Indies were not native speakers of
English would have served to distinguish them from other
non-African bondsmen. Their speech, which "none could understand"

73
was often referred to in 17th century descriptions of Gypsies in
England (cf. Hancock, 1984:92-95, and Beier, 1985:60). Von
Uchteritz, in 1652 (before the first-known trans-Atlantic English
or Scottish shipments of Gypsies) noted that among the slave
population, "Those who are Christian speak English; the Negroes
and Indians, however, have their own strange languages" (Gunkel
and Handler, 1970:93). The existence of the factors, together
with the deeply-entrenched Romani cultural restrictions on
over-fraternizing with non-Gypsies, must certainly have made them
an easily-recognizable group. The second possibility is
supported by the fact that we do have a concrete reference to the
presence of British Gypsies in North America during this period,
turning up in Virginia in 1695 from Henrico county. It is on
record that what appears to have been a charge of rape made by a
Gypsy woman was dismissed by the magistrate,

it being the opinion of this Court that the Act ag'st

ffornication does not touch her, she being an Egyptian
and noe Xtian woman (Anon., 1894:100).

The family name of the woman, Joane Scot, occurs in the Barbados
annals, and survives among American Romanichals today. The
Colonial Entry Book during the same period contained a law which
provided that "all ... gypsies ... shall either be acquitted and
assigned to some settled aboade and course of life here, or be
appointed to be sent to the plantations for five years" (Wright,
1939:141).

There is also documentary evidence to support the third

possibility. Investigation of court records, transportation
certificates and the local British press of the period, together
with compilations published in the United States (such as e.g.
Boyer, 1979), indicate not only extensive shipment of Gypsies,
but the subsequent return of numbers of these to the country of
origin. The conclusion, that "there was a fairly regular traffic
of returnees, both legally and illegally" (Smith, 1979), has much
to uphold it, though with more relevance, possibly, to the penal
colony at Botany Bay in South Australia. This was established
after America's achievement of independence closed Georgia as a
dumping-ground for England's criminals. Numbers of Boswells,
Lees, Skeltons, Scarretts and Smiths were shipped there from the
Midlands counties during the first quarter of the 19th century,
though as felons rather than as slaves or bondservants. The works
of George Borrow and others contain references to Gypsies being
bitcheno pawdel or bitchady pawdel, "sent across" to America or
Australia, a period of Romani history by no means forgotten by
Gypsies in Britain today. One term in contemporary Angloromani
for "magistrate" is bitcherin' mush, the "transporter." Some
factual references to the American situation are to be found in
Pinkerton (1880), and to the Australian situation in Langker
(1980), but much work remains to be done in these areas.

***

The notion of Gypsy is well-established in the West Indian folk

tradition, though no more accurately here than anywhere else in
the world. Wright (1938) tells of the panic the arrival of
Gypsies in Jamaica caused earlier in this century. The word
itself turns up in several of the island creoles, variously
meaning "playful," "frisky," "meddlesome," "mischievous" and
"bossy." In both Jamaica and Trinidad, it also refers to 'pig
Latin', a secret way of talking; in the related dialect of Sierra
Leone, where Jamaicans went to settle in 1800, it has come to
mean a "short person." Similarities between some proverbs in the
same creole with those in Romani have also been noted (Hancock,
1977:73). In Guadeloupe, Le Gitan is a name with which drivers
commonly christen their taxis, trucks, &c. (Métraux, 1950:1411),
while in her introduction to Jekyll's collection of Jamaican
folktales, Alice Werner draws parallels with Gypsy themes
(1907:xxvi).

A search for the existence of Romani words in the Caribbean

creoles has so far turned up only two, the items bul "buttocks"
and kori "penis." The former is known in Barbados, Tobago,
Trinidad and probably elsewhere. It is unlikely that the word
which, like the Romani language itself is of Indian origin, came
in with the thousands of indentured East Indian laborers, since
they did not go at first to Barbados. In any case, the word is
unknown to them in their own speech, mainly Bhojpuri, which uses
instead the terms bunda or gar. The latter has so far only been
found in Trinidad. Its form is specifically Angloromani, i.e. the
type of Romani spoken only by Romanichals, and again differs from
the equivalent term in Bhojpuri.

The world-famous pre-Lenten carnival in Trinidad traditionally

has a Gypsy section, and the costumes colorfully and accurately
represent the Hollywood stereotype. Indeed, it is quite possible
that this portrayal owes more to modern fictional literature
imported from Britain than to any unbroken continuum with the
17th century. There is also currently a popular calypsonian
called 'Gypsy'.

The Gypsy slaves may have been absorbed into the (mainly Irish,
Scottish and south-western English) white bondservant population,
though it is hard to imagine this happening voluntarily. This is,
however, the argument maintained by Marchbin (1939:119). More
likely intermixture with the general free colored population took
place as a result of the forced concubinage described by Moreton

75
above - the same process which has produced, though not by force,
the 'Black Irish' of Jamaica and the Afro-Gypsy community at
Atchefalaya. Bercovici, with a fair amount of imagination, has
speculated that

It is very possible that these Gypsies, then in

Barbados, sought refuge with the Indians, intermarried,
and were completely assimilated by the aborigines ...
perhaps this might account for some customs common to
the American Indians and the Hindus (1928:510).

Shoemaker has also referred to the interaction of the two

peoples, rather anticlimactically: "... the first contact between
Gipsy and Indian, a romantic and historic foregathering of
oppressed peoples ... as one old man from the Little Sand Hills
of Dauphin County said in describing it, 'they hated one
another"' (1924:6).

There is a local poor white population in Barbados, known as the

Redlegs, whose members are distinct in their appearance from
other whites in the country. A similar white West Indian
population is found in Montserrat, and there are numbers also in
Bequia, St. Vincent, Grenada, Jamaica and elsewhere (Williams,
1985), but none has yet been investigated with Romani genealogy
in mind. The list of Barbadian Redleg families (Bradshaw, Davis,
Dowding, Edwards, Gibson, Gooding, Graves, Harris, Hinkson, King,
Marshall and Medford) contains a few surnames also found among
North American Romanichals (e.g. Davis, King and Marshall) but
Hotten, who was well-acquainted with Romanichal language and
history, made no reference to Gypsies in his standard work on
transportations to the islands (1874). The two most
easily-available and complete sources on the Redlegs, Price
(1962) and Sheppard (1977) also make no mention at all of
Gypsies.

There are a great many Romanichals in the United States,

especially in the South. Salo believes that they may constitute
"the largest among the Gypsy groups" in the whole of the country
(1977:7), although estimates within the Romani population put
their own numbers at ca. 80,000, compared with ca. 500,000
Vlax-speaking Gypsies. While descendants of the Gypsies sent here
by the Germans and the French are still sometimes to be found in
the areas they were taken to, Gypsies from Britain, being in
greater numbers, have spread out over the country, and statements
about their history since arrival are speculative at best.
American Romanichal families are aware of the circumstances of
their arrival, and an examination of their oral tradition will
surely help complete the picture. Such internally-transmitted
tradition is being gathered by Harry Bryer, whose family arrived
in North America in the mid-1800s, while a file of
externally-documented records is being compiled by Matt Salo from
an examination of newspapers, parish registers and so on.
Meanwhile, non-academic speculation will surely also continue to
find a place in the printed page, such as that by Burnett, who
believed that the ancestors of the Melungeons of Tennessee "may
have entered the country as Portuguese or gypsies, and afterwards
some families may have intermingled with the negroes or Indians
or both" (1889:349). Until Romani history is documented by
Gypsies themselves, recording this kind of information will
proceed slowly, and inquisitiveness from outside will continue to
be discouraged. The editor of the February, 1986, issue of Romany
Fires of Revival, for example, a privately-circulated evangelical
newsletter sent out monthly to some 600 American Romanichals,
cautioned his readers that two specialists were "gathering
information about the Travelers and doing a research on our
people."

It is tempting, perhaps, to look for Gypsy elements in North and

South American and West Indian music, dress, folklore and
cuisine; this is a justifiable line of pursuit and one which has
not received the attention it should have. There are several
reasons for this: the inaccessible nature of the Romani
communities, the vagueness of the documentation available, and
the strength of the fictional image which confuses the perception
of the reality. False leads are many: "gypsies" in the American
theatre have nothing to do with Gypsies; there is no connection
whatsoever in Romani culture with Hallowe'en, though Non-Gypsies
perceive one; in Cuba, a kind of cake called brazo gitano turns
out to be an importation from Spain.

A case for extensive Romani contribution to Brazilian culture has

already been made by Mello Moraes (op. cit.), who believed that
"the Brazilian nation, from the highest to the lowest, is
strongly tinctured with Gypsy blood," a notion also supported
later by Groome (1899:xvii). Writing nearly ninety years ago
about the West Indian islands, MacRitchie (op. cit.) wondered "to
what extent the people of those places today are possessed of
seventeenth century Gypsy blood ... an interesting, though
perhaps delicate, question." Irving Brown too, writing of the
situation in the United States, believed that "Some of the oldest
Dutch families of Manhattan, and some of the most aristocratic
Creoles of the South, must have a dash of Romani blood in their
veins" (1927:12). But until the British, Caribbean, and North and
South American sources are re-examined at first hand, and
recollections from and by the people themselves are
systematically gathered, it will be difficult to guess, and
little more is likely to be forthcoming in this chapter of Romani
history.

77
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Pariah Syndrome

XIII. The Contemporary Situation of Gypsies
in Europe

The history of the enslavement and persecution of the European

Gypsy population dealt with in these pages is factual. It is also
a fact that, even in the best of times, Gypsy populations have
had to deal with discrimination and prejudice on a daily basis;
much is made in the press of the "Gypsy problem," with scant
regard for the problems which the non-Gypsy population creates in
turn, and with which Gypsies themselves have to deal with on as
daily basis. In Britain, where according to the 1983 report of
the Save the Children Fund the infant mortality rate among
Gypsies is fifteen times higher than the national average, the
City of Bradford sought a court injunction in May, 1985, to make
it illegal for Gypsies to trespass within city limits - a move
which the press called "a policy of apartheid" (Leeds, 1985:6-7).
In the same country some years earlier in March, 1968, a speaker
in a political broadcast from the City of Birmingham publicly
proclaimed that "There are some of these Gypsies you can do
nothing with, and you must exterminate the impossibles; we are
dealing with people whom members of this Council would not look
upon as human beings in the normal sense" (Kerswell, 1979:6). In
October of the same year, the Sundon Park Tenants' Association
Report included the statement that "There is no solution to the
Gypsy problem short of mass murder" (The Essex Post for November
24th, 1969). Teams employed by local governmental bodies to keep
Gypsies on the move by using strongarm tactics are becoming
increasingly common in Britain:

Spook Erection is the name of a company that throws

Gypsies out of their homes; it is employed by several
Midlands councils ... Spook's people are apt to use
violence and intimidation, and there is disturbing
evidence that Spook's methods are condoned by some
local police and council officers.

According to Hughie Smith's eyewitness account ...

Spook's men found Dempsey Boswell and his family; they
were camped on a small site, with [the local Borough
Surveyor's] permission. Watched by police, Spook's men
started to tear the place apart. Boswell's pregnant
sister ran towards the caravan to put out a fire, and
to put away crockery that was being tipped over. In the
 ensuing struggle Dempsey Boswell came to the aid of his
sister, whose baby was stillborn later that day.
Dempsey Boswell was arrested for assaulting five police
officers ... Mr. Boswell pleaded guilty; he was fined
l50 pounds and bound over for two years ...

Tough tactics against Gypsies are now widespread.

Cardiff Council, for example, uses a local company
called Property Protection Agency to clear sites. A
police search instigated by Hughie Smith uncovered an
array of implements such as pick-axe handles, but the
Agency said these were "for defensive purposes only,"
and no further action was taken ... Wolverhampton has
asked outright for a 'Gypsy Task Force', to engage in
"Gypsy prevention operations" (Cook, 1983:16-18).

An earlier incident in the same city of Wolverhampton in 1969 led

to the deaths of four Gypsy children, when a trailer was pushed
over with a bulldozer by the authorities who were attempting to
move it. The wife was ready to give birth to her fourth child,
and her husband had refused to remove his home until the baby had
come. When it was bulldozed, the kerosine lamp was smashed and
started a blaze which killed her three children and resulted in
the still-birth of the child she was to have delivered that day.

The huge discrepancy which exists between official attitudes in

Britain towards Gypsies and towards other minority populations is
starkly illustrated by the following two job advertisements,
issued in 1985 by the City of Leeds Department of Environmental
Health. These were posted side by side on the same document (No.
CD3703, June 28th, 1985):

1) ASSISTANT GYPSY LIAISON OFFICER

The postholder will assist in the enforcement of the

Council's policy on Gypsies ... serving eviction
notices and physically evicting caravans from
Council-owned land ... Assisting in the treatment of
male clients for head, body or pubic lice, scabies and
other conditions. Appearance in court to produce
evidence in support of applications for possession
orders.

2) ASIAN LIAISON OFFICER

To be responsible to the Director of Housing for work

on various housing matters, including housing welfare
... involving the Asian ethnic minority in Leeds, both

79
 in the public and private sectors. To assist the
Department in efforts to achieve equal opportunities in
the field of housing, and to assist in bringing about a
better understanding of the needs and requirements of
ethnic minorities. To provide assistance by acting as
interpreter to overcome the inevitable language
problems which arise.

Just as governmental spokesmen in Britain have, since the end of

the war called for the extermination of Gypsies as a way of
dealing with them, ensuring their non-propagation by means of
sterilization did not stop with Hitler either. The
Czechoslovakian newspaper Vychodoslovenske Noviny, in May, 1976,
carried the text of a governmental proposal which called for the
compulsory sterilization of Gypsies as an act of "socialistic
humanity," and sterilization is clearly what is being referred to
in a more recent news bulletin first published in Bratislava
Smena on August 6th, 1986, and in the Western press in Insight,
on the following September 15th. Claims of a 20 percent rate of
mental retardation among the Romani population are now being made
to justify its instigation:

The destruction of the Romany (Gypsy) minority is the

task of Czechoslovakia's Government Commission for
Problems of the Gypsy Populace. One of its Slovak
officials, Jozef Prokop, who recently expressed
official horror at the high Romany birthrate, claimed
that 20 percent of the 7,000 Gypsies born annually were
mentally retarded. He asserted that those who still
maintained the traditional itinerant lifestyle were
genetically unfit.

Prokop announced that "we will also in the future

pursue regulation of the birthrate of the unhealthy
population." And, as for any children born to
traditional Romany families, "we will have to seek
alternative methods of their upbringing; for example,
in foster homes, special boarding schools and the like
(Anon., 1986a:40).

In Hungary, according to the newspapers Magyar Hirlap and

Kritika, a 1983 pop-song by a group called Mosoly at the Mosaic
Club in Budapest, began

The only weapon with which I can defeat them is a

flame-thrower;
 I will exterminate all Gypsies, adults and children,
Though they can only be destroyed if we cooperate.
If we exterminate them successfully,
We'll have a land free of Gypsies.

In an article entitled "Hungary's Gypsy explosion" in the World

Press Review for October, 1983, a spokesman for the Hungarian
government expressed fears that if Romani nationalism were
encouraged in that country, "we could have pogroms, with Gypsies
killing Hungarians, and vice-versa" (p.12). The same article
pointed out that less than ten percent of Hungary's
officially-estimated nearly 400,000 Gypsies are in the
professions (the unofficial estimate is something over half a
million), and the life expectancy is fifteen years lower than the
national average. According to another article about the
Hungarian situation, "about 15 percent of Gypsy pupils are sent
to schools for mentally deficient children, whereas their
handicap is chiefly a cultural one" (Satory, 1986:5). A medical
investigation by a team of Swedish doctors which was conducted
ten years earlier, concluded that Gypsies are "on average no less
intelligent" than non-Gypsies (Duckenfield, 1976:5). In Italy,

Infant mortality rates are very high - most families

refused to say how many children they had lost, but
over 70 percent of those who answered had lost one or
two, and many families had lost as many as 10 to 15
children.

Respiratory and digestive diseases are rife, life

expectancy is much lower than for the average Italian,
and less than three percent of Gypsies are over 60 (The
Baltimore Sun for October 13th, 1985, p.16A).

A lower life expectancy among Gypsies than the national average

is also reported from Spain, where

Gypsies have been condemned by a hostile society to

live in poverty and ill-health. The average life
expectancy of a Gypsy male is 64 years, nine fewer than
the Spanish average. Only a quarter of Gypsy children
attend school, only 26 percent of Gypsy men have
regular employment ... (Ellman, 1985:J2).

A year prior to that report, in Zaragosa, Spain, non-Gypsies

violently opposed city authorities' building houses for the local

81
 Gypsy population, and retaliated by burning them down and
attacking the Gypsy children trying to attend school there,
pelting them with bricks (The New York Times for October 25th,
1984).

In December, 1985, Reuters released details of the arrest of a

gang of Yugoslav kidnappers in Austria who, since 1980, have been
stealing children from defenseless Gypsy families and selling
them to Americans and Italians. The parents of the of 100
kidnapped children have been too frightened of the authorities to
report these crimes (The Daily Colonist for December 1st, 1985,
p.5 and Rullmann, 1986).

Gypsy children were also systematically taken from their parents

since 1926 in Switzerland, to provide them with a "better life."
An organization named Pro Juventute has headed a program called
"Operation Children of the Road" for many years. "The idea, based
on proto-Nazi ideas of 'racial hygiene', was to destroy the
Romany way of life" (Williams, 1986:10), and are reminiscent of
the new plans announced by the Czechoslovakian government
detailed above.

Although newspaper reports, which often described the

program as a form of "kidnapping," were published as
early as 1973, little was done to unite the families
until recently ... many of the children wound up in
prisons, mental institutions or juvenile detention
centers. [... the lawyer] said "We don't know where all
the children are, if some were adopted, or sent abroad,
if some died." ... In one case cited by Swiss
newspapers, a woman lost five of her seven children to
the program (Netter, 1986:A9)

From Sweden, it was reported in the London Times (for August

21st, 1985), that "An enquiry is to be held into an incident in
which police watched from a patrol car as 50 youths attacked a
Gypsy family with stones and a firebomb, in Kumla, central
Sweden."

Most of the newspaper accounts included here have intentionally

been selected from those which have been published during the
present decade, to give an idea of the situation as it is today.
Hundreds of similar reports are on file in the archives of the
Romani Union, which date back to the last century. But they have
had little effect on the public conscience.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
 The Pariah Syndrome
XIV. The Contemporary Situation of Gypsies
in North America

It is a sad reflection on the state of justice in the United

States that, despite its unconstitutionality, Gypsies remain the
only American ethnic minority against whom laws still operate,
and who are specifically named in those laws. As with Balkan
slavery and the Nazi genocide, it too illustrates the general
lack of awareness among non-Gypsies of the true details of Gypsy
history, despite the vast number of literary works having Gypsy
themes. This fact also serves to demonstrate the enormity of the
separation between the fictional and the real Gypsy. Some of
these laws, only the first two of which were still in effect at
the time of writing, include:

gypsies ... for each county ... shall be jointly and

severally liable with his or her associates [to a fine
of] two thousand dollars (State Code of Mississippi,
Section 27-17-191).

The governing body may make, amend, repeal and enforce

ordinances to license and regulate ... gypsies (New
Jersey Statutes, 40:52-1).

After the passage of this act, it shall be unlawful for

any ... gypsies ... to ... settle ... within the limits
of any county of this state [without having first
obtained a yearly license to do so] (Pennsylvania
Statutes, Section 11810).

Any person may demand of any ... gypsies that they

shall produce or show their license issued within such
county, and if they shall refuse to do so ... he shall
seize all the property in the possession of such
[Gypsies] (Pennsylvania Statutes, Section 11803).

Gypsies [in the State of Maryland] must pay

jurisdictions a license fee of $1000 before settling or
doing business. When any gypsy is arrested, all his
property and all the property of members of any group
with which he may be traveling, can be confiscated and
sold to pay any fine a court may levy against the
arrested gypsy. Sheriffs are paid a $10 bounty for any
gypsy they arrest who pays the $1000 fee after he is
arrested (Logan, 1976).

83
 Whenever ... gypsies shall be located within any
municipality ... the county department of health or
joint county department of health shall have power ...
to order such [Gypsies ...] to leave said municipality
within the time specified (Pennsylvania Title 53:
Municipal and Quasi-Municipal Corporations, Chapter
xvii, Section 3701).

It is illegal in Pennsylvania to be a Gypsy without a

license ... Any Gypsy who insists on being what he was
born - a Gypsy - without a license, is liable to up to
$100 fine and 30 days injail. A constable may
confiscate and sell a convicted Gypsy's possessions to
satisfy the sentence ... any person may demand to see a
Gypsy's license. If the Gypsy cannot produce a license,
the person may turn the Gypsy in to any convenient
justice of the peace (Smart, 1969).

Upon each company of ... Gypsies, engaged in trading or

selling merchandise or livestock of any kind, or
clairvoyant, or persons engaged in fortunetelling,
phrenology, or palmistry, $250 [is] to be collected ...
[from those who] live in tents or travel in covered
wagons and automobiles, and who may be a resident of
some country or who reside without the State, and who
are commonly called traveling horse traders and Gypsies
(Georgia Acts and Resolutions, 1927, Part I, Title II,
Section 56, p.3).

Texas law refers to "Prostitutes, Gypsies and

vagabonds" in the same breath, and charges the Romany
people $500 to live there (Bernardo, 1981:108).

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of

Indiana, that it shall be unlawful for any band of
Gypsies ... to camp in tent, wagon or otherwise, on any
public highway in this state, or lands adjacent thereto
... Any person or persons violating the provisions of
this Act shall be deemed guilty ... and upon conviction
shall be fined not exceeding twenty-five dollars or
imprisoned in the county jail not exceeding thirty
days, or both (State of Indiana Statutory Regulations,
Section I). "This statutory law has been used so often
against the Gypsies in that state, that Indiana has not
been visited by Gypsies for a long time" (Marchbin,
1939:152).

Many of these laws, a list of which fills thirty-four pages

(Gilbert, 1947:567-601), were inherited from Europe and were
intended to be used against the earlier Gypsy populations in the
United States; they have since found new application against the
more recently arrived, and more visible, Vlax-speaking Rom. Smart
(loc. cit.) pointed out the injustice inherent in such laws:
"Because the state does not require an Irishman to have a license
to be Irish, or an Italian to have an Italian license, it is both
un-American and discriminatory for the state to require a Gypsy
to have a license to be a Gypsy."

Steve Kaslov, who founded the first Romani benevolent society in

the United States, the Red Dress Association in New Jersey in
1927, and who met with Franklin D. Roosevelt to try to get some
support for the plight he saw his people in, believed that it was
the police, enforcing such laws, who posed the greatest threat to
American Gypsies:

In county after county, state after state, troopers

whisk unwanted Gypsies over the boundary ... Steve
tells of one such journey: "We were not allowed to stop
for rations" ... Real tears ran down his cheeks at the
bitter memory of that experience ... In New York, as in
other places, the law is often applied to them with
needless cruelty. Only a few weeks ago, a five weeks
old nursing baby died of starvation in an unheated room
when the mother, who was arrested on a charge of
stealing a wallet, was held in the custody of the
police for three days (Weybright, 1938:142,145).

Ironically, while the earliest Gypsies were being brought to

America as unwilling immigrants, the U.S. Government sought to
ban their entry at the end of the 19th century:

... after passing in the early 'eighties the Chinese

Expulsion Act and the Act that barred European contract
labour ... the welcoming arms of the goddess of liberty
that surmounts the huge pedestal on Bedloe's Island at
the entrance of New York harbour, holding aloft the
torch of enlightenment to a darkened world, were at the
end of the nineteenth century extended to selected
immigrants only. The bias against Gypsies which has
obtained for generations in Europe had, through
distorted stories in continental newspapers, by this
time reached America and produced a profound effect. By
the year 1885 Gypsies arriving in parties, as they
usually did, on the shores of the North American
Continent were frequently denied entrance, and the
steamship companies were obliged to take their human

85
 cargoes back by the same boat (Marchbin, 1934:135).

Trigg adds to this:

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, many more

Gypsies, mostly from Slavic countries, were to arrive
in the United States. By 1885, however, Gypsies were
excluded by immigration policy, and many returned to
Europe (1973:224).

Benton's 1985 history of Ellis Island refers to "massive

deportations" of Gypsies by U. S. Immigration Department
authorities in 1905 and 1909 in particular, while Pitkin quotes
from the Tribune for July 25th, 1909, which supported
Commissioner William Williams' upholding of the government's
exclusion policy: "the whole country is better off without them,
even though their wealth per capita was several times greater
than the amount commonly required" which was $25 (Pitkin,
1975:60). A detailed account of Romani immigration into the USA
is found in Marchbin (1939).

Anti-Roma policies towards the end of the 19th century probably

derived their impetus from the increase in discrimination evident
at the beginnings of Reconstruction, following the abolition of
slavery in America; there are several references to Roma as a
"people of color," i.e. as a visible minority, in the literature
of that period. In 1866 President Andrew Johnson expressed his
fear that the requirements of the Civil Rights Bill were designed
"to operate in favor of the colored, and against the white, race"
because they "comprehend the Chinese of the Pacific States,
Indians subject to taxation, the people called Gipsies as well as
the entire race designated as blacks" (Legislation for the
Colored Man, Philadelphia, February, 1866). This presents the
possibility, at least, that Vlax Roma from eastern Europe were
already finding their way into the United States at this early
date.

Calahane indicates that the effects of the American policy had

repercussions even on the other side of the Atlantic; one group,
which had reached Britain from the Continent, could not find a
company willing to bring them across:

We find record of one hundred Gypsies who arrived by

train at Liverpool in July, 1886. They were called the
"Greek Gypsies" and had started from Corfu, but
according to their passports, had come from all parts
 of Greece and European Turkey, bound for New York. The
United States being closed to pauper immigrants, no
steamboat would accept them, and they encamped at
Liverpool ... Their subsequent fate is unknown. No
doubt at some later date some of them, at least,
succeeded in reaching these shores (1904:326-327).

[Illustration with caption]

Gypsies from Hungary waiting to be sent back in 1905 (Benton,
1985)

Gypsies were attempting to reach North America from all parts of

eastern Europe during these years; well-represented in this
exodus were the Rusurja or Russian Vlax Rom, who remember the
events leading to their settlement in this country. The late John
Megel, grandson of Steve Kaslov and until his untimely death in
August 1986, a spokesman for his community, recounted that, prior
to abolition, Gypsies in Russia, although in a condition of
slavery (Hoyland, 1816:32), were not otherwise being brutalized.
With the influx of the thousands of liberated slaves from
Rumania, however, this relatively calm situation was affected,
leading ultimately to a wave of anti-Gypsyism throughout western
Russia serious enough to force many groups to consider leaving
for good. Sons were sent out with instructions to return with
information about the best place to make for. The United States
was an attractive choice, but immigration laws there made it a
problem to enter in the conventional way. It was not difficult,
however, to buy Argentinian documents and thus enter the United
States as nationals of that country; as a result, many Russian
Gypsies sailed for South America, subsequently to make their way
overland along the Pacific coast into the USA. The Argentinians
soon realized that the Rusurja were coming into their country
with considerable amounts of gold, however, and those
newly-arriving started to be apprehended and relieved of all
their possessions by the local people. Gradually, Argentina
ceased to be a principal means of gaining access to the United
States, although there is still a small influx of Rom entering
the country across the border with Mexico. In 1976, one such
group, who had come here from Czechoslovakia and who had been
smuggled across the border by Mexicans hired to bring them in,
were beaten and robbed and abandoned in the Arizona desert ("Just
the Gypsy in their soul?," The Miami Herald, February 1st, 1976,
p.2E). "The border patrol moved at once to deport them to
somewhere. Anywhere, even," and drove them north out of the
state, where they were once again abandoned. In this way, the
group made its way to New York ("Officials seeking to deport
Gypsies frustrated," The New York Times, July 27th, 1976, p.16)
reaching the Canadian border which they crossed, immediately to
be detained by Canadian officials, since the U.S. authorities

87
promptly refused to allow them to re-enter. One of the women in
the group attempted to hang herself in her cell, rather than go
on living being hounded from place to place ("La mort plutôt que
l'expulsion," Journal de Montréal, August 17th, 1976, p.3) Two
anonymous landowners offered the group places where they could
live temporarily, although the offers were not allowed ("Gypsy
clan offered farm in Canada," The Montreal Star, 19th August,
1976, p.A3). Not one of the newspaper reports of this tragic
train of circumstances indicated the slightest sympathy for the
victims, who were eventually deported, but instead made use of
all the journalists' clichés one predictably associates with
Gypsies.

[Illustration with caption]

Gypsy family being detained at Ellis Island

While the expulsion act against the Chinese was repealed in 1946,
the situation regarding the immigration of Gypsies remains
unclear and unresolved. The policy of driving Gypsies away,
however, is still actively upheld by the American legal system.
The June, 1975 issue of The Police Chief ("Official Publication
of the International Association of Chiefs of Police") contained
the recommendation that

Strict laws and the enforcement of them will deter

Gypsies from inhabiting your community. The laxness of
the laws in a certain area ... will attract Gypsies.
Only in this way can you protect your community
(Boughourian and Alcantara, 1975:74).

Since the publication of that article, a whole book has appeared

written in the same vein, by an ex-policeman and a lecturer on
legal matters from Chicago (McLaughlin, 1980), and a number of
police department "Gypsy Divisions," reminiscent of those in
pre-war Nazi Germany's police state have been established around
the country, some with specially-assigned resident "experts."
Needless to say, this kind of legalized discrimination is leveled
at no other ethnic minority, although there are presumably
Italian, Navaho, Irish, &c., criminals as well preying upon the
American public. In 1981, Terry Getsay ("a nationally-recognized
Gypsy expert"), who at that time headed the Illinois State
Police' Gypsy Activity Project, published a particularly vicious
three-part article entitled "GYP-sies: the people and their
criminal propensity" in Spotlight; his lecture tours in the
northern states have led to a marked increase in the harrassment
of Gypsies by members of local police departments who have
attended his talks. He also presented his views on television
station WDIV in Detroit in 1984, in a three-part documentary
entitled "Gypsy scams and schemes." In an article in another
police magazine, Centurion, he is quoted as believing that

The label of 'Gypsy' refers to any family-oriented band

of nomads who may be from any country in the world ...
The only measure of respect a Gypsy woman can get is
based on her abilities as a thief (Schroeder,
1983:59,63).

[Illustration with caption]

Gypsies at Ellis Island awaiting deportation, 1909

Detective Sergeant William Bradway, chairman of the Michigan

State Police Gypsy Criminal Activity Task force, defines Gypsies
as "domineering, very loud, outspoken, cunning and quick-witted
... they are completely comfortable with a lifestyle centered
around victimizing others. They are not very nice" Willing,
1984:3A). A year earlier, a documentary on the NBC news program
Monitor began "American Gypsies, known as Travelers: if you've
never met the Travelers, lucky you!" (NBC transcript for March,
1984).

The association of Gypsies with crime is deep-rooted. Some of it

is justified; Gypsies have often turned to theft in order to
survive in a universally hostile environment. Much of it is not
justified, however, and is the result of exploitation of a
stereotype by a popular press which is less interested in the
honest Gypsies who have not been equipped to challenge this
misrepresentation. Journalist Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, in his
review of Peter Maas' highly defamatory King of the Gypsies, went
so far as to refer to Gypsies as the "slag in the [American]
melting pot," and to call them "an ethnic sick joke" (The New
York Times for October 28th, 1975). The notion of Gypsies as
criminals has received scholarly sanction too, in the past. A
study of crime by a professor of psychiatry and criminal
anthropology at the University of Turin, published by the
American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology in 1918,
described Gypsies thus:

They are the living example of a whole race of

criminals, and have all the passions and all the vices
of criminals. "They have a horror," says Grellmann, "of
anything that requires the slightest application; they
will endure hunger and misery rather than submit to any
continuous labor whatever; they work just enough to
keep from dying of hunger" ... they are vain, like all
delinquents, but they have no fear or shame. Everything

89
 they earn, they spend for drink or ornaments. They may
be seen barefooted, but with bright colored or
lace-bedecked clothing, without stockings, but with
yellow shoes. They have the improvidence of the savage
and that of the criminal as well ... they devour
half-putrified carrion. They are given to orgies, love
a noise, and make a great outcry in the markets. They
murder in cold blood in order to rob, and were formerly
suspected of cannibalism ... this race, so low morally,
and so incapable of cultural and intellectual
development, is a race that can never carry on any
industry, and which in poetry has not got beyond the
poorest lyrics (Lombroso, 1918:40).

This appeared in a textbook which for years provided a basis for

American legal attitudes, and has been relied upon, just as
Lombroso relied upon Grellmann before him, by subsequent
specialists. Similar biases were found even earlier in the 1911
edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica: "Cleanliness is not one
of their characteristics ... they are self-professed liars ...
The Gypsies can, with some justification, be called parasites ...
Both the men and the women are gaudy, ostentatious, boastful,
arrogant and superstitious ... those who wish to think of them as
verminous dirty wastrels will be able to find examples to back
... their claim," while at pp. 43-44 in Volume XI of the 1956
edition of the same work, these attitudes are even more plainly
stated:

The mental age of an average adult Gypsy is thought to

be about that of a child of ten. Gypsies have never
accomplished anything of great significance in writing,
painting, musical composition, science or social
organization. Quarrelsome, quick to anger or laughter,
they are unthinkingly but not deliberately cruel.
Loving bright colors they are ostentatious and boastful
but lack bravery. They have little idea of time,
proportion or measurement and are superstitious about
childbirth, fertility, food and sickness. Their tribal
customs sometimes have the force of law. Believing in
charms and curses, they admit the falsity of their
fortune telling. They betray little shame, curiosity,
surprise or grief and show no solidarity.

The reasons for this prejudice, which has its roots in the
Mediaeval conflict between Christian and Muslim, as well as for
its perpetuation in the modern day, are discussed further in the
following chapter.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Pariah Syndrome

XV. Anti-Gypsyism

Gypsies have existed as an oppressed people for a variety of

reasons. Perhaps the most significant of these originated in the
time and circumstances of arrival in Europe, but a number of
other factors complicate the picture as well.

Because of the nature of their entry into Europe, Gypsies arrived

as a scattered nation of people united by language, culture and
origin, but at the same time lacking any of the means by which
other populations bound by the same factors assert and defend
their identity. Gypsies had no political or military strength,
and no geographical territory with which they could identify. Nor
had they a history, or a religion, or a language which was
familiar to those around them. Association with the Islamic
threat, their dark skin, and the various means of livelihood
which exploited the superstitious nature of the Medieval
Europeans, all helped instill a negative image of the Gypsy in
the Western tradition. When a group lacks the conventional means
of redressing wrongs done to it, it will make the most of what is
available; the fear of Gypsy magic was called upon as a means of
reprisal some years ago in Florida, for example: a mother whose
child was the victim of a hit-and-run accident "vowed to cast a
Gypsy curse extending over three generations on the driver and
his family if he does not come forward and pay the child's
hospital bill" (Buchanan, 1975:1B). Such incidents help only to
reinforce the stereotype from which they ultimately derive.

In addition to these external factors, internal factors have also

helped keep the barriers firm. To a greater or lesser extent all
Gypsy groups have inherited from India concepts of pollution and
cleanliness, and these form a powerful basis for maintaining
social distance from non-Gypsies. These beliefs extend into many
areas of daily life, regulating involvement with food and its
preparation, animals, personal hygiene, and interaction with
others, both Gypsy and non-Gypsy. Among some groups, these
concepts are vaguely defined; among others, the Vlax in
particular, they are deep-rooted and pervasive. It is because of
these cultural beliefs that Gypsies have discouraged familiarity
with non-Gypsies who, by their manner of living, fall
automatically into an unclean category, and are therefore able to
pollute by association. The earliest accounts of Gypsies
unanimously agreed that Gypsies had no religious or cultural
beliefs; some more modern treatments, while admitting that these

91
exist, maintain that they have all been adopted from outside. It
is understandable that writers such as Hoyland, Crabb and others
came to such conclusions - they were permitted no such
information by the Gypsies they were so ardently trying to
civilize. Contemporary exponents of this view, such as Jiri Lipa
or Jozsef Vekerdi, are less easily accounted for.

This reserve has had other, further-reaching effects; not often

being able to obtain information at first hand about the true
nature of Romani life, novelists have embellished their prose
with fantasies of their own, and in doing so created in the last
century the literary figure with which the Gypsy is today most
often associated: a composite Gypsy, wearing Spanish flamenco
dancer's dress, traveling in an English Gypsy caravan, playing
Hungarian Gypsy music.

The first American account to discuss Gypsies at any length

appeared in the Christian Enquirer for September 29th, 1855;
American readers were given a picture which must have helped set
the stage for what followed:

The Gipsies ... are an idle, miserable race, a curse to

the countries they inhabit, and a terror to the farmer
through whose lands they stroll. They seem utterly
destitute of conscience, and boast of dishonesty as if
it were a heavenly virtue ... Laws have been passed in
several countries to banish them, and great cruelties
sometimes practiced to enforce these laws ... So deeply
rooted are sin and vagrancy in the hearts of this
miserable race, that neither penal laws nor bitter
persecution can drive it out. They are not beyond the
power of the Gospel, however, nor yet beyond the mercy
of the Redeemer.

Attitudes towards the Gypsy today are mixed; while negative

characteristics, usually theft or baby-stealing, often provide
the rationale in fiction for introducing Gypsies into the plot,
other, more positive characteristics also find a place. One such
is the supposedly unfettered nature of Gypsy life, an outlet for
the Victorian reader who no doubt longed for simpler,
pre-Industrial Revolution times. But however Gypsies are defined
and presented by the dominant culture, such definition and
presentation denies Gypsies their real identity, and this is
ultimately a kind of oppression.

The notion of an "outlet" has been discussed by Cohn, who

believes that Gypsies "persist because they, or groups like them,
are needed in our culture" (1973:61), in other words, there
exists a need for an avenue of escape, for whatever reason, and
Gypsies, or more accurately the fictional image of Gypsies, are
useful in providing this (discussed at length in Hancock, 1976).
Sibley, quoted in the introduction, goes further and sees the
denial of the real Gypsy identity as one means by which the
dominant society can maintain its own parameters. Quoting from
Erikson (1966:13,64), Ronald Takaki has also elaborated upon this
notion of parameter-maintenance by keeping non-members in their
place:

Deviant forms of behavior, by marking the outer edges of group

life, give the inner structure its special character and thus
supply the framework within which the people of the group develop
an orderly sense of their own cultural identity ... one of the
surest ways to confirm an identity, for communities as well as
for individuals, is to find some way of measuring what one is not
(1979:126).

Yet another rationale is provided by Kephart, who explains

anti-Gypsyism in terms of Gypsies being seen as a countercultural
population, a group of people actually working against the values
of the majority:

American Gypsies, too, continue to face prejudice and

discrimination ... Some observers contend that it is a
matter of ethnic prejudice, similar to that experienced
by blacks, Chicanos and other minorities. However, it
is also possible that the Rom are perceived as a
counterculture ... If people perceive of Gypsies as a
counterculture, then unfortunately for all concerned,
prejudice and discrimination might be looked upon as
justifiable retaliation (1982:43).

The Rom least well-equipped to retaliate against such social

pressures are those best represented in the American Gypsy
community: the Vlax, most of whose history in Europe has been one
of enslavement. Existing for centuries in a society which
provided all of what little material possessions they had, and
which allowed them no involvement in any kind of decision-making,
their modern descendants still look to the establishment as a
source of support rather than as something to be worked with for
the long-term good. British and Hungarian Gypsies, subject to
more assimilative pressures in their countries of origin, for
better or for worse have learned to melt more effectively into
the larger society, and have a much higher proportion of
"professional" occupations represented among them in the United
States. An exception among the Vlax are some of the Machvaya and
other Rom of Serbian origin, a number of whom have also aquired

93
mainstream occupations as well as high status within the Vlax
community. It is likely that this is also due to assimilative
factors. After abolition, those fleeing from Rumania westwards
into Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia fared very differently from those
who went eastwards into Russia:

In Servia, the leveling power of Turkish rule, exerted

for successive ages, had the effect of elevating the
Gypsies somewhat toward the social status of the other
rayahs. Here, therefore, although they are still an
inferior caste, and not allowed to exercise the rights
and powers of citizenship, the Gypsies are perhaps less
widely separated from the peasantry around them than
anywhere else in Europe. They fought bravely with their
Servian neighbors against the Turks, and as smiths,
farriers, and dealers in live stock, have many of them
earned a comfortable livelihood, and proved themselves
respectable members of society (Clark, 1898:504).

***

It cannot be denied that the fuel for much of the discrimination

against Gypsies in contemporary America is provided by the media.
It requires very little effort on the part of those writing for
the popular press, whether as journalism or fictional literature,
to consult the existing sources and come up with material of
their own without ever approaching Gypsy agencies themselves for
their information. Almost all of the thousands of works relating
to Gypsies have been written by non-Gypsies, and it is probably
true that most of those have based their creations on the works
of other non-Gypsies without ever checking their facts at first
hand.

Despite the enormous responsibility that journalists have in

transmitting information to the public, with very few exceptions
the media continue grossly to misrepresent Gypsies and to
perpetuate negative, and often defamatory, stereotypes. Appendix
two consists of a collage of such representation, from
newspapers, magazines, comics, books and films. It has become so
commonplace for the press to define Gypsies, an ethnic people,
solely by behavioral criteria, that Gypsies themselves will
frequently deny their identity:

A Houston builder and Gypsy ... now doesn't tell anyone

he's a Gypsy because he says it would ruin his
business. "I'm not ashamed of it," he says, "but you've
got to understand the effect it could have" (Linthicum,
1985:8G).
It is also true that, because of the widespread enforcement of
laws over the past centuries which have forbidden Gypsies to stop
anywhere, and consequently to attend school, Romani cultures have
developed as non literate cultures. Even in countries with
long-settled Gypsy populations - and today the majority of the
world's Gypsies are not nomadic - a way of life which does not
include literacy as a primary skill continues to be perpetuated.
As a result, the kinds of organized approaches made to television
stations, congressmen, newspaper editors and the like which other
minorities have used to bring their point of view before the
public, have simply not been within reach. Lacking access to
lawyers, and other establishment means of seeking redress,
Gypsies have not, until recently, been able even to take the
first step towards challenging media misrepresentation. A
situation exists today in which those who write for the popular
press feel quite at liberty to say the most outrageous things
about Gypsies, while they would be aghast if they were ever
expected to put their names to the same kind of article about,
say, Italians or Jews or Afro-Americans.

Non-Gypsy populations receive most of their knowledge of Gypsies

from works of fiction and from the media, rather than from
Gypsies themselves. Journalists and novelists for years have had
completely free reign to exploit their fantasies in print,
comfortable in the knowledge that no one would be likely to
challenge them - and certainly that no Gypsy ever would. When
Peter Maas was asked in a Washington Star interview (November
25th, 1975) why he felt he could make such negative claims about
Gypsies in his book, he replied that no Gypsies had challenged
them, that protesters were "just not out there." A traditional,
fictional image of the Gypsy, of non-Gypsy origin, has emerged
and has become so deeply entrenched in the popular mind that the
real thing remains unseen.

From an urban perspective, "real" Gypsies - that is,

those conforming to the romantic myth - are a rural
people; from a rural perspective, "real" Gypsies no
longer exist; they are a part of a vanished folk
culture. We might compare Brody's description of the
"real" Eskimo as conceived by the white community in
the Canadian North: "the tough, smiling, naive,
ultimately irrational soul who, animal-like, is deeply
attracted to roaming the open spaces of the limitless
tundra and ice." Again, the mythical individual is
removed from the dominant society and merges with
nature (Sibley, 1981:18).

95
In Britain and France, Romani Gypsies in dirty roadside sites are
condemned as unsanitary squatters who give the "real Gypsies" a
bad name. The romantics defend the "true Romany" and write of
their "purity of blood," perceiving a clear distinction between
the Borrovian ideal and what they see in real life. Others are
less charitable: a letter to the press from an angry citizen in
England complained that "they are very much detested and feared
... even the true gypsy glamourised by George Borrow was never
liked" (The Surrey Advertiser for April 19th, 1977). In the
United States and Canada, the average citizen is likely to think
that there are no Gypsies in those countries at all. They never
see the campfires and waggons they associate with Gypsies, or the
violin-toting individuals sporting earrings, embroidered vests
and tambourines. Books and articles have been written which refer
to Gypsies as "hidden" or "invisible" Americans, and Gypsies make
good use of this fictional image as a shield between themselves
and outside society, even giving it back if it is in their
interests to do so.

Over a century ago, Simson dispaired at the widespread false

perception which existed of the Gypsy, and at their exaggerated
image as "wanderers":

The popular idea of a Gipsy, at the present day, is

very erroneous as to its extent and meaning. The
nomadic Gipsies constitute but a portion of the race,
and a very small portion of it (1865:8).

Little has changed in the intervening century. Okely, in a

recently-published work on the British Traveller population shows
how "Outsiders have projected onto Gypsies their own repressed
fantasies and longings for disorder" (1983:232), and makes the
point that "Gypsies do not travel about aimlessly, as either the
romantics or the anti-Gypsy suggest" (p.125). Much is made of
this, as well as of stealing and promiscuity, in sustaining the
stereotype. Stealing in particular is seen as a Gypsy trait;
specialists such as Lombroso or Getsay have even implied that it
is a genetic characteristic. Certainly some Gypsies steal, just
as some Eskimos or Berbers or Englishmen steal; others don't. It
is social behavior, and it is not transmitted biologically. To
believe that such a thing is possible reflects not only
prejudice, but an ignorance of scientific fact.

Problems which exist today are the result of a continuum of

circumstances going back for centuries. Few could argue that
there has not been moral justification for subsistence stealing
in the past, or that in some places it continues to be necessary,
although this is not likely to be taken into consideration in a
court of law. Historically, stealing has meant survival, and
there are many shopkeepers throughout Europe even today, who will
not serve Gypsies. There are homeowners, too, who will refuse to
give Gypsies as much as a glass of water*. Given the the choice
between seeing one's family starve, or else stealing, the latter
is going to be the likelier option, whether one is a Gypsy or
not. But the public doesn't seem to be interested in Gypsies who
don't steal; perhaps it spoils the image it has created.

*A newspaper item which appeared in the South Ealing Post for

January 18th, 1974, carried the headline "Residents 'scared' by
the gipsies." Speaking for the Wayfarers' (sic) Tenants
Association, spokeswoman Norma Halford said "It is terrible, some
of the things they are doing: they are knocking on doors and
asking for water."

There are a number of cases on file in the archives of the Romani

Union, of crimes such as shoplifting being perpetrated by people
reported as Gypsies, but who in fact turn out not to be Gypsies
at all. The label is freely applied by police reporters on the
basis of behavior assumed to be typical of ethnic Gypsies - which
of course it is, if the model sought is the Gypsy of fictional
literature. It is to the credit of the Saint Paul Chief of Police
that he apologized publicly in 1985 for thus misapplying the word
in the news bulletins issued by his department. There are
hundreds of thousands of Gypsies in the United States who deplore
the illegal activities of those who make the news, and who make a
clear distinction between themselves and "le Rom kaj choren,"
i.e. Gypsies who steal, and there are hundreds of thousands who
try to make a decent and honest living in the face of adversity.
Gypsy priests and ministers don't ever seem to generate media
interest.

History has shown time and time again that oppressor nations
either attribute their own techniques of domination to the people
they dominate, or else reinterpret their oppressive acts in what
they perceive to be a positive way. Shifting blame onto the
victim is a self-exonerating response well known in psychiatric
circles. Dougherty devotes a whole appendix (1980:354-358) to the
theme of Gypsies stealing babies, but gives no irrefutable
evidence to support this widespread belief. The documentation
gives another side to the story: it has been Gypsy children who
have been stolen from their parents by non-Gypsies. The Swiss
situation which came to light in 1973, discussed in chapter XIV,
is one recent example. The author's own father was taken from his
parents in 1918 for the same reasons, ostensibly for his own good
(Hancock, 1985:53). Hoyland writes that "from such Gipsies who
had families" in Maria Theresa's Hungary, "the children should be
taken away by force; removed from their parents, relations, and

97
intercourse with the Gipsey race." One child, "a girl fourteen
years old, was forced to be carried off in her bridal state. She
tore her hair for grief and rage, and was quite beside herself
with agitation" (1816:69-70). Grellmann recommended that taking
Gypsies' children be used as a means of coercion:

The Gipseys, in common with uncivilized people,

entertain unbounded love for their children. This
excessive fondness for their children is, however,
attended with one advantage: when they are indebted to
any person, which is frequently the case in Hungary and
Transylvania, the creditor seizes a child, and by that
means obtains a settlement of his demand, as the Gipsey
will immediately exert every method to discharge the
debt, and procure the release of his darling offspring
(1807:65-66).

In the introduction to the new edition of her book Gypsies: The

Hidden Americans from the Waveland Press, (1986), Anne Sutherland
tells of a communication from the Chief of Police of one northern
city who, having read the first edition of her book, expressed
gratitude at having learned of such close family feeling amongst
the Rom because he could now use it, by exerting pressure upon
Gypsy children, to keep their parents in line.

"Wandering" or "roaming" is another commonly-repeated attribute,

and are words which frequently find a place in accounts about
Gypsies. Yet the words imply aimlessness, as though Gypsy lives
have no purpose or direction; they are often qualified by words
like "carefree." The harsh conditions of life on the road are
never dealt with, and the day-to-day responsibility of feeding a
family and keeping it clothed and warm is trivialized out of
existence.

If I am fancy free,
And love to wander -
It's just the Gypsy in my soul*.

*Copyright Messrs. Boland and Jaffe (1936)

Gypsies in western Europe have traditionally been kept on the

move because of laws which have given them no alternative. Means
of livelihood have been developed which are adapted to this kind
of life, and have subsequently become part of the stereotype.
Individuals not conforming to these - who include a growing
number of those involved in the Romani civil and political rights
movement - are not infrequently denied their Gypsy identity by
sociologists and others whose investment in them depends upon
their remaining passive and traditional. A Gypsy in a horse drawn
wooden caravan is ideal; in a motorized trailer, not quite so
authentic; in a house, he's a total disappointment; as journalist
Ira Berkow said in a 1975 feature story, "Gypsies are,
shockingly, also becoming home owners!" (1975:20).

[Illustration with caption]

Gypsies in France must have their papers examined and stamped by
the police in each district they enter

Another stereotypically attributed characteristic is that Gypsies

care nothing for material possessions, in keeping, of course,
with the perceived "freedom" of a people unencumbered with the
trappings of civilized society. Elsewhere (Hancock, 1986b), I
have illustrated this with statements that the Romani language
does not even contain a word for "possession," reiterated by six
different writers over the course of almost a century. Anyone
with any familiarity at all with Gypsies would quickly be
disabused of this notion: the traditional lack of material
possessions is a result of social circumstance, not personal
whim. Other words the language is not supposed to contain are
"truth" (Phelan, 1951:81) and "beauty" (Woolfe, 1928:78). None of
these writers could speak Romani, however.

Gypsy women have for long been represented as sexual temptresses,

and Gypsy men as a sexual threat to non-Gypsy women, in both song
and story. The Impressions' Gypsy Woman has been recorded by a
dozen artists since it was first released in 1961, and tells of
the singer's watching the girl, longing to kiss and hold her as
"all through the caravan, she was dancing with all the men" in
the "campfire light"; Gypsy Davy is a traditional ballad about a
lady who left her mansion and her husband to go off with a Gypsy;
Lawrence's novel The Virgin and the Gypsy is a typical literary
work along the same lines. And yet it was the European
slaveowners who took Gypsy women at their will and used them,
while calling them "whores," and it was the European slaveowners
who castrated their male slaves to protect their own women from
their servants' lust.

Cohn may be right when he argues ( loc. cit.) that non-Gypsies

need a Gypsy image to project their fantasies onto; an example of
this appeared in the Sunday supplement of one Boston newspaper in
August, 1986. Describing a Romani family in that city, the writer
stated on the first page of her article that from their
appearance, "... they could be Spanish, or French, or Italian, or
Irish," but by the second page she had already begun to be
carried away by the lure of the stereotype:

99
 They are glitter and gold, decked out in bright
babushka of legend. They are exotic women in colorful
skirts, dancing in sensual swirls. They are dark men
with smoldering eyes. They are carefree spirits playing
the tambourine. The entire image is crowned with a halo
of mystique, shrouded in a cloak of mystery. And there
is some truth to all of it (Brink, 1986:4-5).

The article also stated that Gypsies don't work, have no

professional people among them, and are not officially recognized
as an ethnic community in the United States.

In addition to the popular observer, there exists a substantial

body of academics who specialize in Gypsy Studies, and who have
established scholarly reputations for themselves by doing so. The
opinions of these individuals are perhaps even more important
than those of the untutored, since these are the specialists who,
if it is sought at all, are approached for information about
Gypsies. Romani scholarship rests upon the work of these people:
Grellmann, Pott, Miklosich, Ascoli and others have laid the
foundation for what we know of Romani language and history.

The Victorian preoccupation with the "purity" of the noble savage

is understandable in the light of those times, and the attitudes
of 19th century "Gypsy buffs" whom Dougherty says "tended to be
either superficial sentimentalists or genteel snobs looking for a
feudal relic to coddle and patronize" (1980:273), must be
interpreted with that in mind. But it is a singular
characteristic among some of the contemporary students of Gypsies
that the same attitudes persist. Where these people could do more
than any other outsiders to help the Romani cause, they
stubbornly refuse to disturb their anthropologists' and
folklorists' perception of the Gypsy. We may compare 19th century
statements made by such specialists with those made in the 20th
century: Paspati maintained that "it is in the tent that the
Gypsy must be studied, and not in the villages of the bastardized
sedentary Gypsies" (1880:14), and Pischel believed that "the
Gypsy ceases to be a Gypsy as soon as he is domiciled and follows
some trade" (1883:358).

Twentieth century investigators have sometimes challenged reality

in the light of direct evidence. Jaroslav Sus, a Czech, claimed
that it was an "utterly mistaken opinion that Gypsies form a
nationality or a nation, that they have their own national
culture, their own national language" (1961:89). The former
sub-editor of the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, Brian
Vesey-Fitzgerald, scorned the Romani nationalist movement as
"romantic twaddle" (The Birmingham Post for July 14th, 1973,
p.2), echoing the words of Dora Yates, honorary secretary of the
same society, to which she belonged for 63 years and who,
referring to the same movement, asked "except in a fairy tale,
could any hope ever have been more fantastic?" (1953:140).
Another member, Werner Cohn, believes that

The Gypsies have no leaders, no executive committees,

no nationalist movement ... I know of no authenticated
case of genuine Gypsy allegiance to political or
religious causes (1973:66).

The most recent denial of the nationalist movement has come from
yet another member of the Gypsy Lore Society, Jiri Lipa:

To be exact, there is no one Gypsy culture nor one

Gypsy language ... If in the process of looking for
native assistants and for training them [the
gypsilorist finds that] literary talents should appear,
so much the better ... In reality, however, it is mere
toying, a waste of energy and material means which are
not abundant for Gypsy studies. While a missing
attribute is being artificially contrived, which is
supposed to make the Gypsies an ethnic minority in the
conventional sense in the eyes of wishful thinkers and
bureaucrats, irreplaceable values of Gypsy culture are
being lost in our time (1983:4).

***

These attitudes on the part of the non-Gypsy population, whether

academic or popular, are a direct result of centuries of
oppression, an oppression which has denied Gypsies the
wherewithal to make their voices heard and to challenge
discriminatory laws and widespread negative media stereotyping.
Other persecuted peoples have begun to redress the wrongs being
perpetrated against them; there are now no laws operating against
American Indians or Afro-Americans in this country, nor are they
maligned and misrepresented in the press. Books presenting them
in a defamatory light are removed from school libraries now as a
matter of course. Not so for Gypsies, however, who continue to
provide a source of romantic and other exploitation, and who
continue to be taken advantage of because of their traditional
lack of organized political, academic or military strength.
Writing of the post-emancipation situation in Moldavia and
Wallachia, and of the gains made by other linguistic and cultural
minorities in modern Rumania, Beck makes this point well:

101
 Romania's German-speaking populations have received
support from the West German state, Magyars are
supported by the Hungarian state, and Jews by Israel.
Groups like the Tsigani did not have such an
advantage. Lacking a protective state they have no one
to turn to when discrimination is inflicted upon them
as a group. Unlike ethnic groups represented by states,
Tsigani are not recognized as having a history that
could legitimize them (1985:103).

Gypsies use their language and core-culture as a kind of moveable

country; wherever they have gone, ethnic identity has usually
been maintained despite fragmentation and, until recently, a lack
of international cohesiveness. Whether the three branches of
Gypsy discussed at the beginning of this book prove to belong to
one migratory stock or not, it is clear that the Western Romani
people were united linguistically and culturally at the time of
entry into Europe. Whatever factors divided the contemporary
populations, and they are not inconsiderable, they are
overwhelmingly the result of involvement with the non-Gypsy, and
are directly relatable to the oppression here described. If
Romani Gypsies are to regain that unity, the causes and nature of
the oppression which destroyed it have to be understood and
challenged.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Pariah Syndrome

XVI. Afterword

In the preceding chapters, an attempt has been made to describe

the prejudicial treatment of the Rom in non-Romani societies,
both in North America and throughout Europe, and to propose an
explanation for the origin of anti-Gypsyism in history and its
perpetuation in the present day.

That such bigotry exists at all levels is clearly evident; the

very people appointed at the official level to deal with this
ethnic minority work from the assumption that there is no such
thing as a decent Gypsy: "To Jose Alcantara, one of two officers
permanently assigned to the so-called Gypsy detail [in Los
Angeles], there is no such thing as an honest Gypsy
fortune-teller. Or an honest Gypsy, for that matter" (Stumbo,
1984:1). Gypsies are routinely blamed for their own condition; a
Czechoslovakian spokesman defended his government's program of
taking Romani children from their families and placing them in
foster homes, by saying that it was "the Gypsies' fault for
refusing to let their children be civilized" (Rosenblum,
1984:6C).

The two attributes seen to be lacking here are honesty and

civilization, and in such arguments, both are perceived of as
corollaries to the "nomadic" way of life of the Gypsy people.
Individuals who are here today and gone tomorrow, are potentially
prime suspects in cases of theft, for example - especially if
they already have a reputation as thieves, and if they can be
accused with little likelihood of that accusation's being
challenged.

I have also discussed the various arguments, such as those of

Cohn, Sibley and Crawford, which in one way or another maintain
that non-Gypsy societies need an outsider group such as the Rom
upon whom to project their fantasies, or else to serve as
scapegoats, or to help maintain the boundaries of their own
cultural perception. All of these, I believe, have some merit;
the extent to which such rationales are reflected in the folklore
and the popular culture of the countries dealt with here
testifies to this.

Although it has been demonstrated that the mobility of the Romani

population has been the result of historical circumstance, which
in most countries left no option other than torture or death, and
which forced such mobile families into a way of life and
livelihood compatible with a stop-and-start existence, this
mobility has been romanticized in fiction and has become a
mainstay of the Gypsy stereotype. Much of Europe's Romani
population was held in slavery until the middle of the last
century, and never left the estates at all, except perhaps to be
driven to the slave auctions to be exhibited for sale. Those in
northern and western Europe, paying the price for having been
confused with the "Tatars" and "heathens" who threatened
Christianity and the whole of the western economy, were subjected
to the extremes of oppression dealt with in earlier chapters.

Most of the American Rom descend from the Gypsies freed from
slavery in south-eastern Europe between 1855 and 1864. As Acton
has pointed out, this places the modern population only four or
five generations from a sedentary existence which stretches back
to the Middle Ages, and which hardly qualifies that population as
"nomadic." An FBI crime squad investigating an alleged case of
racketeering by a group of Rom in Virginia was designated
"Operation Nomade", however, indicative of the kind of
preconception most commonly held about Gypsies (The Seattle Times
for September 27th, 1986). During the time of emancipation and
arrival in North America, Gypsies, like many other immigrant
groups, came fleeing persecution, but met anti-Gypsy laws which

103
were designed, as in Europe, to keep them on the move and out of
the way. American Gypsies have learned to hide their identity in
order to avoid discrimination, and since the end of the Second
World War in particular, as Gropper (1975) has shown, the
American Romani population has become increasingly urban and
increasingly settled, though living invisibly in order to be able
to do so free of harassment.

This gradual integration has not been easy; integration leads in

time to assimilation and the loss of one's traditional language,
culture and identity, and among the Rom this is strenuously
resisted. At the Romani tribunals, or krisa Romane, the
continuance of tradition and the Romani language frequently
become serious issues, as are discussions of dress, marriage and
territorial jurisdiction.

Such fierce adherence to the ethnic identity seems to annoy some

non-Gypsies. Jews have experienced the same kind of resentment,
as though this exclusivity were a threat to the outside world.
People who have been traditionally uncommunicative are perceived
as secretive, and if they are secretive, they cannot be trusted.
And if they remain on the move, never mind why, they must have
something to hide. Another common reaction is that such groups
must feel themselves to be superior and aloof from the rest of
the world - and this, too, does little to enhance their image.

American Gypsies make a distinction between themselves and more

recently arrived immigrant groups and maintain, rightly or
wrongly, that it is the criminal activity of these people which
gives them a bad name. Despite the situation in the United
States, it is a much better place to live for Gypsies than any
European country, and given that the Vlax Romani population
arrived here illiterate and legislated against, many have done
remarkably well. But some groups who came here, from Poland, or
Czechoslovakia, say, left incredibly oppressive environments
where schooling, or access to shops or even churches has been
denied them, and where any means possible to survive were
necessary. Part of a letter smuggled out of Rumania to the West
and received in November, 1986, describes the situation of Rom in
that country today:

Every time we request our rights as citizens, and the

rights of our minority, we are arrested by the police
and detained for many days without food, violently
beaten, interrogated and threatened with expulsion from
the town. Because of all these reasons, we crossed the
Rumanian border illegally, but were sent back to
Rumania where we were sentenced and imprisoned for one
year. Since our release, we have found that the social
 and political situation of our minority is worse ...

Like such behavior among other older immigrant populations, who

shun more newly-arrived members of their own group, little is
done either on the part of the established Romani community to
help the themenge Roma or "foreign" Gypsies coming here, although
it is widely known that the situation in Europe is a drastic one.
Among third- and fourth-generation American Romani families, the
lessons of history have ensured that the plight of those in
trouble with the law, or elsewhere in the world, or even in the
Holocaust, be regarded with fatalism. Perpetuation of a family
has meant breaking up into smaller groups, each one for itself,
either to escape and survive, or else to be tracked down and
destroyed or transported.

Although the distinction between American and foreign-born

Gypsies is an important one within the Romani population itself,
it is not one recognized by the larger society, which remains
unaware, in fact, that there even exist wide differences of
ethnic type within the overall American-born Gypsy population.
The word "gypsy" is often applied to any people who conform to
the perceived image, whether they are ethnic Romanies or not. It
is paradoxical that while this great land was settled by men and
women crossing its vast expanses with horse and wagon, and
American society remains the most mobile in the world today, the
inherent distrust of the non-sedentary population, of which
Gypsies are believed to be the archtypical members, is everywhere
in evidence. An out of town checking account or an out of state
driver's license invite suspicion, and they can certainly hamper
one's daily interactions outside of one's own settled community.
Populations on the move suffer especially from being subject to
laws designed for static communities; the history of the American
Indian has similarly been one of violating the laws of another
people and paying the price as a result.

While the situation for Gypsies in the world today is crucial,

and according to reports may be getting worse (Rosenblum, 1984),
we have moved into a new phase of Romani history. As the true
facts of that history become more widely known, and the mystique
which clouds the real issues gradually disappears, positive
changes are for the first time being brought about. Romani
spokesmen are becoming more vocal and more evident as confidence,
and the educational ability to be so confident, grow. This is not
a trend which is likely to change, but its progress is uneven. We
have come a long way from slavery, but while Pope John Paul asked
Africans to forgive Christians for their past role in the
enslavement of that people (The Easton Express for August 14th,
1984, p.C12), the Romani population has yet to receive the same
acknowledgment. The Holocaust is nearly half a century behind us,

105
 but the Romani population still waits for the world to recognize
its fate under the Nazis, and for a place on the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Council, where it remains (as of November, 1986) an
often unnamed category within that Council's "ethnic outreach"
program. The Congressional Caucus on Human Rights sent a petition
to the Czechoslovak government in October, 1986, protesting its
treatment of Gypsies, yet the coverage by CBS of the kidnapped
Gypsy children being trained as thieves in Italy and France by
criminals, themselves Gypsies (on 60 Minutes, November 9th, 1986)
was needlessly trivial, succeeding only in reinforcing the
stereotype of the Gypsy as Thief. The same situation is being
exploited in the form of an entire movie, called "Gypsy Caravan",
being made by London-based Saltzman Lowndes Productions, and
scheduled to appear in August, 1987. Since the completion of this
manuscript, with Congressional intervention, the U.S. office of
the Romani Union has been instrumental in bringing about the
complete removal of all anti-Gypsy laws in the state of
Pennsylvania. It has also begun working with the British legal
firm of Bindman and Partners, who have been retained by the
Commission for Racial Equality to bring legal proceedings against
the businesses in Britain which discriminate against Gypsies and
which carry signs outside their premises indicating that Gypsies
will not be served.

Pariah status means not belonging; the syndrome, or multiplicity

of factors, which underlies this status as outcast as described
in this volume has led to Gypsies' having become locked into a
cycle of anti-social behavior which is the result of a continuum
of centuries of oppression, but which has ensured the
perpetuation of that oppression. More and more, Gypsies
themselves are initiating, and participating in, moves to end
this situation, and to challenge discrimination in the news and
in the media. The cycle is at last being broken.

A NOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY

Throughout, except in quotes from other works, the spelling

Rumania(n), rather than the more widely-accepted Romania(n) has
been preferred in order to distinguish it more readily from
Romani.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Pariah Syndrome

XVII. Appendix A: Definition of Terms

ATHINGANOI. A heretic Byzantine group with which Gypsies were

confused, hence the various names such as Zigeuner, Cigan, &c.
 (Greek).

ANGLOROMANI. The variety of Romani spoken by the Romanichals or

British Gypsies, wherever they have gone to live. It differs
considerably from the inflected Romani of the Vlax Rom, and is
not mutually intelligible with it.

AURARI. Goldwashers. Also called ZLATARI (Rumanian).

BALKAN. As applied to dialects of Romani, includes those which

developed south of Moldavia and Wallachia. They are spoken today
mainly in Greece and Bulgaria.

BALKANS. An area of south-eastern Europe which includes

continental Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Jugoslavia,
Rumania and sometimes Hungary.

BITCHADY PAWDEL (or BITCHENO PAWDEL). Transported to the American

or Australian penal colonies, lit. 'sent across'. A term used by
the Romanichals or British Gypsies (Angloromani).

BITCHERIN' MUSH. Magistrate, lit. 'sending man'. A term used by

the Romanichals or British Gypsies (Angloromani).

BOSHA. Gypsies in Armenia who call themselves LOM; speakers of

Central Gypsy dialects (Armenian).

BOYARS (also BOIARS, BOYARDS). The landed gentry; barons

(Rumanian).

BOYASH (also BAYASH, BEYASH, BEASH). A Vlax Romani population,

wide spread throughout Europe and the Americas, who descend from
the RUDARI and who have a Rumanian dialect as their native
language instead of Romani (deriv. from preceding).

BYZANTINE EMPIRE. A Christian empire incorporating what are today

Turkey and parts of south-eastern Europe, which lasted from the
sixth to the fifteenth century.

BYZANTIUM (later CONSTANTINOPOLIS, CONSTANTINOPLE, ISTANBUL).

The
capital of the Byzantine Empire; sometimes wrongly applied to the
empire itself.

CALDERARI (or KALDERASHA). Makers of copper vessels (Rumanian).

CANGUE. A spiked harness used as a restraining device around the

neck (French).

CETE. A group of Gypsies to be sold in a single lot (Rumanian).

107
CHIVUTSE (CHIVUTSELE, SPOITORESELE). Whitewashers (Rumanian).

CIOCOI (also VATAVE). An overseer (Rumanian).

COSTORARI. Tinners (Rumanian).

CHURARI. Sievemakers (Rumanian).

DANUBIAN. A branch of European or Western Romani: also called

VLAX.

DESROBIREJA. Emancipation from slavery (Romani, from Rumanian).

DOM. Speakers of Eastern Gypsy dialects.

DOM. A menial class in India whose occupations include musicians,

slaughterers, janitors, &c., and members of the SHUDRA caste.
Believe by some to be the ancestors of the Gypsies.

DOMARI. The language of the DOM; speakers of the dialects of

Eastern Gypsy, inhabiting Syria and other parts of the Middle
East (Domari).

DOMBA. Hypothesized ancestors of all three branches of Gypsy.

DOMBARI. The Proto-Gypsy language.

ENDLÖSUNG. During Hitler's Nazi regime, his policy of

exterminating all unwanted racial, ethnic and social elements
from his new society. The 'Final Solution' (German).

FALAGUE. Flaying the soles of the feet as a means of punishment

(French).

FERARI (or HERARI). Workers in iron (Rumanian).

GADZHIKANO. Masculine singular adjective meaning "non-Gypsy"

(Romani).

GADZHO. Male non-Gypsy, plural GADZHE. The feminine form is

GADZHI, plural GADZHJA (Romani).

GORNIK. In Hungary, a title meaning Gypsy overseer (Hungarian).

HOSPODAR (or GOSPODAR). A word meaning 'lord', formerly born as a

title of dignity by the governors of the Ottoman PORTE for the
provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia.

JEKHIPE (or JEKHETHANIBE). Unity, lit. 'one-ness' (Romani).

KIRPACHI. Basketmakers (Rumanian).

KOVACHI. Blacksmiths (Rumanian).

KSHATRIYAS. A member of the military caste, the second highest of

the four castes among the Hindus.

LAIESHI (or LAIETSI). Slaves who were allowed to move about on

the estates, an who did a variety of jobs (Rumanian).

LAUTARI. Musicians; strictly, fiddlers (Rumanian, from

Turkish/Arabic).

LINGURARI. Makers of wooden spoons (Rumanian).

LOMAVREN. The language of the Bosha (Lomavren).

LOWBEY. A people inhabiting The Gambia in West Africa which, it

has been suggested, descended from the French Gypsies abandoned
on that coast in 1802. Known locally as Lawbe or Laybe (Peul).

MAMALIGA. Cornmeal porridge, commonly eaten throughout Rumania

and other parts of eastern Europe. A staple diet for the slaves
(Rumanian).

MESTERE-LACATUCHI. Makers of keys, locks and burglar-bars

(Rumanian).

MONGOLS. Invaders from central Asia, some of whom had begun to be

converted to Islam by the late 1200s.

NAJU (also NAYU, NAIU). A pan-pipe; musical instrument fashioned

from reeds cut to different lengths fastened side by side, the
tops of which are blown across.

NETOCI (or NETOTSI). Plural of NETOTO, q.v.

NETOTO. A slave who escaped to the mountains and who lived as a

fugitive. The word is said to mean "not complete" (Rumanian).

OTTOMAN. The Turkish dynasty belonging to Othman (Osman) I,

founded ca. AD 1300.

PORTE. The Ottoman court at Constantinople (French).

POTCOVARI. Ironworkers and shoers of horses (Rumanian).

RABI GOSPOD. Name given to Gypsy slaves in Russia (Russian).

109
RAJASTHANI. The language of the Rajputs (Indic).

RAJPUTANIA (or RAJASTHAN). Part of north-western India inhabited

by the RAJPUTS.

RAJPUTS. A predominantly military north-western Indian people,

who claim to be descended from the KSHATRIYAS. Believed by some
scholars to have been the ancestors of the Gypsies.

ROBI. Slaves. In European Vlax Romani, Rrobo means "captive" or

"prisoner"; in American Vlax it means "one unwilling to work"
(Rumanian, from Slavic. Cf. RABI GOSPOD).

RROM. In all varieties of Western Romani this word is found

meaning "husband" or "Gypsy man" (as opposed to GADZHO or
non-Gypsy man); for Vlax-speaking Gypsies, it is further used to
define themselves as opposed to other, non-Vlax-speaking Gypsy
groups. The feminine is RROMNI (Romani).

RROMANES. Adverbial form meaning "in the Gypsy manner"; sometimes

used to mean the Romani language.

ROMANI. Feminine singular adjective meaning "Gypsy." Often

applied to the language, and used also as a noun (older spelling
ROMANY, plural ROMANIES).

ROMANICHAL (also ROMNICHAL, ROMNICHEL). Designation for those

Gypsy populations from northern Europe, and especially the
British Isles, as opposed to, e.g., the RROM.

RUDARI (also RUDARS, LUDARI, BLIDARI, LINGURARI). Makers of

wooden spoons, troughs, plates, spindles, &c. The name RUDARI was
also applied to those engaged in goldwashing.

SALAHORI. House-builders (Rumanian).

SALASH. A job-lot of slaves sold together (Rumanian).

SHATRA. A Gypsy village. Also used to refer to a job-lot of

slaves sold together (Rumanian).

SCLAVI. Slaves (Rumanian).

SCLAVI COEVESHTI. Slaves of the barons, also called SCLAVI

BOIARESHTI (Rumanian).

SCLAVI CURTE. Slaves of the court (Rumanian).

SCLAVI DE MOSHII. Slaves belonging to the petty landowners

(Rumanian).
SCLAVI DOMNESHTI. Slaves of the gentry (Rumanian).

SCLAVI GOSPOD. Slaves of the householders (Rumanian).

SCLAVI MONASTIVESHTI. Slaves of the Church (Rumanian).

SCINDROME. Slave (plural SCINDROMI) (Rumanian).

SELJUKS. Members of a Turkish dynasty ruling between the 11th and

13th centuries, prior to the OTTOMANS.

SKOPICA (also SCOPITSA, plural SCOPITSI). A eunuch; one of a

caste of coachdrivers castrated as children and used to transport
the female gentry (Rumanian).

SLOBUZENJA. Freedom (Romani, from Slavic).

SPOITORESELE (or CHIVUTSE, KIVOUTSE, CHIVUTSELE). Whitewashers

(Rumanian).

SUDRA. Lowest of the four Hindu castes, believed by some to have

been the ancestors of the Gypsies (Sanskrit).

TATARS (sometimes TARTARS). Name applied to various Turkic

peoples, including the Turki and Kirghiz, who overran the
Byzantine Empire. It was also applied indiscriminately to the
MONGOLS, who are not a Turkic people.

TSIGAN (plural TSIGANI). Gypsy (Rumanian).

TSIGANI DE CASATSI. House slaves (Rumanian).

TSIGANI DE OGOR. Field slaves (Rumanian).

TRIBUT. Taxes (Rumanian).

URSARI. Bear trainers (Rumanian).

VATAVE (or CIOCOI). Overseer (Rumanian).

VATRASHI (or VATRARI). Slaves who did a variety of jobs,

including those of groom, stable keeper, coachman, &c.
(Rumanian).

VAXUITORI DE GHETE. Cobblers and leather-workers (Rumanian).

VICA (or VITSA; plural VICI, VITSI). A clan or social division

within Vlax Romani society. Literally "vine" or "tendril"
(Rumanian, from Slavic).

111
 VINZATOARE DE FLORI. Flower-sellers and sellers of sheaves of
grain (Rumanian).

VLAX (also VLACH, WALLACHIAN or DANUBIAN). A branch of European

Gypsy consisting of those dialects which developed in the Balkans
during slavery time. They are characterized by massive lexical
and structural influence from Rumanian.

VRAJITOARELE (or GICHISORI). Fortune-tellers. This was not a

legitimate category within slavery but provided amusement for the
gentry; these women were among the LAIESHI, and moved all over
the estates (Rumanian).

YANSERS. Name applied to Gypsies in 19th century New York.

ZLATARI (also called AURARI). Goldwashers (Slavic); not slaves.

--------------------------------------

XVIII. Appendix B. Media Representation

of Gypsies

A collage of newspaper headlines, comics, cartoons, &c., mainly

taken from American and British sources, depicting Gypsies.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Pariah Syndrome

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